Square complex orthogonal designs with low PAPR and signaling complexity

Space-Time Block Codes from square complex orthogonal designs (SCOD) have been extensively studied and most of the existing SCODs contain large number of zero. The zeros in the designs result in high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and also impose a severe constraint on hardware implementation of the code when turning off some of the transmitting antennas whenever a zero is transmitted. Recently, rate 1/2 SCODs with no zero entry have been reported for 8 transmit antennas. In this paper, SCODs with no zero entry for 2^a transmit antennas whenever a + 1 is a power of 2, are constructed which includes the 8 transmit antennas case as a special case. More generally, for arbitrary values of a, explicit construction of 2^a times 2^a rate a+1/2^a SCODs with the ratio of number of zero entries to the total number of entries equal to 1 - aplusmn1/2^a 2^[logs2^{(2 a /a+1)]} is reported, whereas for standard known constructions, the ratio is 1- a+1/2^a. The codes presented do not result in increased signaling complexity. Simulation results show that the codes constructed in this paper outperform the codes using the standard construction under peak power constraint while performing the same under average power constraint.