A new full-rate full-diversity STBC for 2 TX with low complexity ML decoding

A new construction of a full-diversity full-rate space-time block code (FDFR-STBC) is presented in this paper. The design is for 2 transmit antennas and 2 time slots. The code outperforms the previous FDFR-STBC codes in [3], [4], [5], [6] for 1 receive antenna. We reduce the decoding complexity by exploiting the algebraic structure of the code and using the hybrid maximum-likelihood interference cancellation (HMLIC) decoding algorithm and show that it achieves optimum ML performance. Finally, we study the performance of our proposed code over 2 x 2 multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels and show that it outperforms the Alamouti code for all signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).