Space-time coded OFDM for high data-rate wireless communication over wideband channels

There has been an increasing interest in providing high data-rate services such as video-conferencing, multimedia Internet access and wide area network over wideband wireless channels. Wideband wireless channels available in the PCS band (2 GHz) have been envisioned to be used by mobile (high Doppler) and stationary (low Doppler) units in a variety of delay spread profiles. This is a challenging task, given the limited link budget and severity of wireless environment, and calls for the development of novel robust bandwidth efficient techniques which work reliably at low SNRs. To this end, we design a space-time coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated physical layer. This combines coding and modulation. Space-time codes were previously proposed for narrowband wireless channels. These codes have high spectral efficiency and operate at very low SNR (within 2-3 dB of the capacity). On the other hand, OFDM has matured as a modulation scheme for wideband channels. We combine these two in a natural manner and propose a system achieving data rates of 1.5-3 Mbps over a 1 MHz bandwidth channel. This system requires 18-23 dB (resp. 9-14 dB) receive SNR at a frame error probability of 10/sup -2/ with two transmit and one receive antennas (resp. two transmit and two receive antennas). As space-time coding does not require any form of interleaving, the proposed system is attractive for delay-sensitive applications.