High-Rate and Low-Complexity Space-Time Block Codes for 2 x 2 MIMO Systems
Abstract
The main design criteria for space-time block codes (STBCs) are the code rate, diversity order, coding gain, and low decoder complexity. In this letter, we propose a full-rate full-diversity STBC for 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a substantially lower maximum likelihood (ML) detection complexity than that of existing schemes. This makes the implementation of high-performance full-rate codes feasible for practical systems. Our numerical evaluation shows that the proposed code achieves significantly lower decoding complexity while maintaining a similar performance compared to that of existing rate-2 STBCs.