Space-time block coding for wireless communications: performance results

We document the performance of space-time block codes, which provide a new paradigm for transmission over Rayleigh fading channels using multiple transmit antennas. Data is encoded using a space-time block code, and the encoded data is split into n streams which are simultaneously transmitted using n transmit antennas. The received signal at each receive antenna is a linear superposition of the n transmitted signals perturbed by noise. Maximum likelihood decoding is achieved in a simple way through decoupling of the signals transmitted from different antennas rather than joint detection. This uses the orthogonal structure of the space-time block code and gives a maximum likelihood decoding algorithm which is based only on linear processing at the receiver. We review the encoding and decoding algorithms for various codes and provide simulation results demonstrating their performance. It is shown that using multiple transmit antennas and space-time block coding provides remarkable performance at the expense of almost no extra processing.