A New Diagonally Layered Spatial Multiplexing Scheme with Partial Channel Knowledge

Vertical layering with successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver (e.g. V-BLAST) is a popular spatial multiplexing scheme that achieves high data rates over multi-antenna wireless channels. However, SIC suffers from low diversity gains and recently, with limited feedback, a diversity optimal SIC receiver has been proposed based on greedy QR decomposition (GQR-SIC). But the low diversity gain of the first decoded layer degrades the overall diversity gain. In this paper, we present a new diagonally layered spatial multiplexing scheme that employs GQR-SIC receiver but achieves significantly higher diversity gains. In the proposed scheme, the diversity gain of a weak layer is improved through interleaving the co-ordinates of the symbols transmitted over the weak layer and a strong layer. In this work, we focus on spatial multiplexing with only two layers and analyze the diversity multiplexing tradeoff to show that the proposed scheme achieves maximum diversity gain. When compared with other diagonally layered schemes, the proposed scheme has low decoding complexity.