Improved Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes with Multiple Transmit Antennas Using Hadamard Transform

In this paper, imposing the Hadamard Transform (HDT) on Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBC) schemes using multiple transmit antennas is proposed in order to increase the reliability and improve the error performance of wireless communications. It is referred to as joint Hadamard transform and OSTBC schemes with multiple transmit antennas. However, HDT is used to change the location of constellation points by converting the transmit symbols of OSTBC system, and hence extending the Euclidean distance between transmit symbols for a precise detection. Simulation results demonstrated that increasing the number of transmit antennas in OSTBC systems employing 8-PSK improves the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance as in the case of OSTBC 2×2 scheme where an SNR of about 13.5 dB is required to achieve a BER of 10^-6, while only about 7 dB in OSTBC 8×8 scheme is required to obtain the same error probability. It is also demonstrated that imposing the Hadamard criteria on the OSTBC 2×2, 4×4, and 8×8 schemes has showed a performance improvement of about 3 dB, 6 dB and 9 dB, respectively, as compared to the conventional OSTBC systems.