Ordered array processing for space-time coded systems

The zero-forcing interference suppression and cancellation scheme proposed by Tarokh et al., in 1999, for grouped space time coded system suffers performance loss due to limited diversity gains for the first detected antenna groups, and power allocation was suggested to overcome this problem. In this letter, we propose an ordered detection algorithm which compensates the diversity loss by always detecting the group with the strongest post-ing signal-to-noise ratio. Compared with the power allocation scheme, our proposed scheme is more robust to varying channel conditions and when used with iterative interference cancellation, a performance gain of 2.4 dB can be obtained at a frame-error rate rate of 10^-2.