Stratified diagonal layered space-time architectures: signal processing and information theoretic aspects

We consider a multielement antenna system that uses M transmit and N receive antennas [an (M,N) wireless link] impaired by additive white Gaussian noise in a quasistatic flat-fading channel environment. The transmitter, which is subject to a power constraint, does not know the random outcome of the matrix channel but does know the channel statistics. The link operates under a probability of outage constraint. We present a novel architecture using stratified space-time diagonals to express a message for efficient communications. The special message arrangement, which is termed stratified-diagonal-BLAST (SDBLAST), enables receiver signal processing that substantially mutes self interference caused by multipath without incurring waste of space-time. We investigate the proposed communication structure in important downlink categories, showing that, in theory, the message architecture is optimally efficient for all (M, 1) systems and extremely efficient when M(greater than)N. We quantify the capacity performance of SD-BLAST using empirically generated complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDFs) for (16, 5), (8, 3), and (4, 2) systems to exhibit near optimal performance most especially for the (16, 5) system.