Punctured super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes

In this paper, we propose punctured super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes. First, considering a system with two transmit antennas, we present the basic design criteria for the punctured super-orthogonal codes. Then, staged decoding, a sub-optimal decoding technique used in single-input single-output systems, is extended to the proposed punctured codes. To reduce the complexity of staged decoding, we propose two complementary design rules of the punctured super-orthogonal codes. After that, we discuss the constraints under which the punctured codes can be designed without metric distortion. Compared with the conventional codes, the punctured super-orthogonal codes can provide lower decoding complexity. Also, they allow an easy implementation of various spectral efficiencies with a single encoder/decoder. Furthermore, the puncturing scheme can be generalized to the case of more than two transmit antennas. In addition, we implement differential modulation schemes based on the punctured codes. Such implementations do not require channel estimation at the transmitter and the receiver. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the punctured super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes is close to that of the corresponding conventional codes in the literature.