Abstract

Space-time block codes alone generally have little or no coding gain. To extract coding gain, space-time block codes have been previously concatenated with an outer trellis to generate simple and powerful codes, known as super-orthogonal codes. This work has two main themes: it explores methods and algorithms that generate coding gain in block codes without a trellis, as well as improve the coding gain in the presence of a trellis.

When an outer trellis is available, our results generalize the super-orthogonal codes by finding new code supersets and corresponding set partitioning, resulting in improved coding gain. New algorithms are developed to efficiently build trellises for various full-rate MIMO codes, therefore we extend the concept of trellis-block MIMO coding beyond orthogonal and quasi-orthogonal codes.

In the absence of a trellis, a technique called single-block coded modulation is proposed to improve the coding gain of all varieties of space-time block codes. Because no trellis is used, there is no dependency between successive transmission blocks, which has favorable consequences in terms of delay and complexity. This new class of block codes outperforms corresponding known space-time block codes.