Extended balanced space-time block coding for wireless communications

Diversity techniques are very effective tools to increase signal reception quality in Rayleigh fading channels. A well-known method to increase diversity in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication is transmit antenna selection (TAS). However, TAS is very sensitive to feedback errors. One of the alternative techniques to TAS is balanced space-time block coding (BSTBC) which guarantees full diversity for any number of transmit antennas, provided that few bits of feedback from the destination to the source are available. The main drawback of the BSTBC is limited coding gain since few numbers of code matrices can be generated in the originally proposed scheme. In this work, the authors extend the balanced space-time block code family to improve its coding performance. In our proposed scheme, larger number of codes can be generated for improved coding gain. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated for both multi-input singleoutput (MISO) and cooperative communication cases. Relay selection (RS) algorithm – the TAS equivalent in the cooperative communications – is also considered. Simulation results show that near optimal (infinite feedback) performance can be achieved with four bit extension of the BSTBC and better signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained compared to TAS or RS schemes. The difference in performance becomes more prevalent in the presence of feedback errors.