Space-Time Codes for MIMO Systems: Quasi-Orthogonal Design and Concatenation

The demand for mobile communication systems with high data rates and improved link quality for a variety of applications has dramatically increased in recent years. New concepts and methods are necessary in order to cover this huge demand, which counteract or take advantage of the impairments of the mobile communication channel and optimally exploit the limited resources such as bandwidth and power. Multiple antenna systems are an efficient means for increasing the performance. In order to utilize the huge potential of multiple antenna concepts, it is necessary to resort to new transmit strategies, referred to as Space-Time Codes, which, in addition to the time and spectral domain, also use the spatial domain. The performance of such Space-Time Codes is analyzed in this thesis with and without conventional channel coding strategies. In case without conventional channel codes, the focus is on diversity-oriented SpaceTime Codes. Based on Space-Time Block Codes from orthogonal designs (OSTBC), the Space-Time Block Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs are developed for any number of transmit and receive antennas. The outcome of this construction are two groups of codes. The main property of the first group is the support of links with high quality. This is achieved by incorporating spatial and temporal redundancy, which results in full diversity or in other words, in the maximum decay of the bit error rate curves. Full diversity is also achieved by OSTBC, which due to their structure transform the matrix-valued channel for multi-antenna systems, so called multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO)-channels, into several parallel, scalar single-inputsingle-output (SISO)-channels. This insight and the understanding of the properties of the equivalent SISO-channels were the key results in order to analyze the performance of the OSTBC. The determination of the structure of the equivalent channel is also a matter of vital importance in this work. To this end, we show that the MIMO-channel in the case of Space-Time Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs is transformed into an equivalent block-diagonal MIMO-channel with identical blocks having constant eigenvectors, independent of the channel realization. Furthermore, we show that the eigenvalues of each block are pairwise independent and follow a non-central chi-square distribution, where the number of degrees of freedom equals four times the number of receive antennas. By relaxing the requirement of full diversity one arrives at the second group of SpaceTime Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs. These codes represent a generalization of Space-Time Codes from orthogonal designs. Particularly, we show in this work, that not only the Alamouti-scheme, a OSTBC for two transmit antennas, but also its generalized version achieves capacity in the case of one receive antenna. The drafted codes are then analyzed with respect to the error rate performance and the spectral efficiency with optimal as well as suboptimal receiver structures. In the second part of this work the combination of Space-Time Codes with conventional channel coding techniques is considered. New receiver structures are presented and the performance of Space-Time Codes with iterative algorithms for soft-input-soft-output-decoding is analyzed and optimized with the help of new analytical tools, the so called EXIT-charts. Furthermore, some criteria for the optimal