Block-orthogonal space-time codes with decoding complexity reduction

Conventional approaches to high-rate space-time codes (STC) design focus on achieving maximum diversity and spatial multiplexing gains, hence they always have high decoding complexity. In this paper, we propose and construct a new class of STC, called block-orthogonal STC (BOSTC), which has a simplified ML (maximum likelihood) or near-ML decoding structure. We demonstrate the tradeoff between decoding complexity and decoding performance. Results show that due to the decoding complexity reduction, our proposed BOSTC can outperform the previously known codes when keeping the decoding complexity to be the same.