Combining beamforming and orthogonal space-time block coding

Multiple transmit and receive antennas can be used in wireless systems to achieve high data rate communication. Efficient space-time codes have been developed that utilize a large portion of the available capacity. These codes are designed under the assumption that the transmitter has no knowledge about the channel. In this work, on the other hand, we consider the case when the transmitter has partial, but not perfect, knowledge about the channel and how to improve a predetermined code so that this fact is taken into account. A performance criterion is derived for a frequency-nonselective fading channel and then utilized to optimize a linear transformation of the predetermined code. The resulting optimization problem turns out to be convex and can thus be efficiently solved using standard methods. In addition, a particularly efficient solution method is developed for the special case of independently fading channel coefficients. The proposed transmission scheme combines the benefits of conventional beamforming with those given by orthogonal space-time block coding. Simulation results for a narrow-band system with multiple transmit antennas and one or more receive antennas demonstrate significant gains over conventional methods in a scenario with nonperfect channel knowledge.