A New Information Lossless STBC for 2 Transmit Antennas with Reduced-Complexity ML Decoding

Abstract

A new information lossless, full-rate space-time block code is presented for 2 transmit antennas over 2 symbol periods. We show that our code is capacity-achieving and exploit its special algebraic structure to derive a reduced-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm. When the number of receive antennas is greater than 1, our code outperforms the Alamouti code. Comparing the performance of our code with state-of-the-art B2Phi and Golden codes in [4] and [7], demonstrates competitive performance for practical low-to-medium SNR ranges, for high spectral efficiencies, and as the number of receive antennas increases while requiring much lower ML decoding complexity.