An Optimum Detector for Space-Time Trellis Coded Differential MSK

Space-time (ST) coding using Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) has spectral advantages relative to linear modulations. In spite of the spectral benefits, Space-Time Trellis Codes (STTC) using the CPM implementation of Minimum Shift Keying (MSK) scheme has inherent inphase and quadrature interference, when the received complex baseband signal is the input into the matchfilter to remove the shaped sinusoid pulses. In this paper a novel optimum transmitting and detecting structure for STTC-MSK is proposed. Treating the Alamouti scheme as an outer code, each STTC MSK waveform frame is immediately followed by the orthogonal conjugate waveform frame at the transmit side. At the receiver first orthogonal wave forming is applied, then a new time-variant yet simple trellis structure of the STTC-MSK signals is developed. This STTC-MSK detector is absolutely guaranteed to be I/Q interference-free and still keeps a smaller computation load compared with STTC-QPSK. Simulations are made over quasi-static AWGN fading channel. It is shown that our detector for ST-MSK has solved the I/Q interference problem and has around 2.8 dB gain compared with the Alamouti Scheme and 3.8 dB gain for bit error rate at 5× 10−3 in a 2 by 1 Multiple Input Single Output system.