Kronecker Product-Based Space-Time Block Codes

This letter presents a new approach to construct space-time block codes (STBCs) based on the Kronecker product. The proposed Kronecker-structured STBCs (K-STBCs) are specially designed for constant modulus constellations and include the classical linear dispersion (LD) codes as a special case. Its inherent Kronecker structure offers additional coding gains due to the mutual spreading of multiple space-time codewords. At the receiver, an efficient algorithm is derived by recasting the decoding of the K-STBCs as a rank-one tensor approximation problem. The proposed decoding algorithm provides a good bit error ratio (BER) performance especially, in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In particular, our numerical results show that K-STBCs outperform the existing quasi-orthogonal STBCs due to the denoising gain offered by the proposed rank-one approximation based detector.