Author Description

Space-time block code (STBC) is a maturing technology to achieve transmit diversity over fading channels. As the number of transmit antennas increases beyond two, current approaches to design STBCs either make trade off between the achievable diversity gain and the code rate, or achieve both full diversity and full rate at the expense of exponentially increased decoder complexity. This book presents a new STBC design method that combines two real orthogonal STBCs (O-STBC) with offset QAM. This approach is able to achieve both full diversity and full code rate, yet allows simple real symbol wise decoding whose complexity is independent of the number of transmit antennas. This book provides a detailed analysis of the impact of key system parameters on the error performance of the scheme. A complete chapter is devoted to systematic design of the two real O-STBCs for optimal error performance. This book should be useful to any researcher who is in the field of MIMO communications, or any engineering professional who is looking for an effective STBC solution for practical implementation.