Single-carrier space-time block-coded transmissions over frequency-selective fading channels

We study space-time block coding for single-carrier block transmissions over frequency-selective multipath fading channels. We propose novel transmission schemes that achieve a maximum diversity of order N_tN_r(L+1) in rich scattering environments, where N_t (N_r) is the number of transmit (receive) antennas, and L is the order of the finite impulse response (FIR) channels. We show that linear receiver processing collects full antenna diversity, while the overall complexity remains comparable to that of single-antenna transmissions over frequency-selective channels. We develop transmissions enabling maximum-likelihood optimal decoding based on Viterbi´s ( 1998) algorithm, as well as turbo decoding. With single receive and two transmit antennas, the proposed transmission format is capacity achieving. Simulation results demonstrate that joint exploitation of space-multipath diversity leads to significantly improved performance in the presence of frequency-selective fading channels.