Rotationally invariant space-time trellis codes with 4-D rectangular constellations for high data rate wireless communications

We demonstrate rotationally invariant space-time (ST) trellis codes with a 4-D rectangular signal constellation for data transmission over fading channels using two transmit antennas. The rotational invariance is a good property to have that may alleviate the task of the carrier phase tracking circuit in the receiver. The transmitted data stream is segmented into eight bit blocks and quadrature amplitude modulated using a 256 point 4-D signal constellation whose 2-D constituent constellation is a 16 point square constellation doubly partitioned. The 4-D signal constellation is simply the Cartesian product of the 2-D signal constellation with itself and has 32 subsets. The partition is performed on one side into four subsets A, B, C, and D with increased minimum-squared Euclidian distance, and on the other side into four rings, where each ring includes four points of equal energy. We propose both linear and nonlinear ST trellis codes and perform simulations using an appropriate multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel model. The 4-D ST codes constructed here demonstrate about the same frame error rate (FER) performance as their 2-D counterparts, having however the added value of rotational invariance.