High-Rate Full-Diversity Space-Time Block Codes with Linear Receivers

In this paper, we deal with the design of high-rate space-time block codes (STBCs) that achieve full-diversity with linear receivers which enable symbol-wise decoding. We propose three new high-rate coordinate interleaved STBCs and prove that they can achieve full-diversity with linear receivers for any optimally rotated square QAM constellation. Recently, Shang and Xia proved that the symbol rate of an STBC achieving full-diversity with a linear receiver is upper bounded by one complex information symbol per channel use (pcu). However, we show that with the use of coordinate interleaving, the proposed STBCs can exceed this upper bound to 4/3 complex information symbols pcu for two, three and four transmit antennas. For the symbol-by-symbol decoding of the proposed STBCs, we adapt the partial interference cancellation (PIC) group decoding algorithm recently proposed by Guo and Xia, and then further modify this decoder by applying successive interference cancellation (SIC) operation. Simulation results show that when linear receivers with minimum decoding complexity are used, the proposed STBCs achieve better error performance than their counterparts given in the literature.