Flexible Signal Space Diversity Techniques from MDS Codes with Fast Decoding

Signal space diversity technique has been widely adopted in wireless communication systems to combat channel fading by exploiting time diversity, frequency diversity, spatial diversity or a combination of them. Most existing signal space diversity schemes are based on linear constellation spreading. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear signal space diversity technique based on maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. The new technique provides a design flexibility to support almost any number of diversity channels and desired diversity orders. We also propose a simple and suboptimal diversity channel selection (DCS) decoding for our new scheme. DCS decoding can significantly reduce the decoding complexity with a marginal performance loss relative to the optimal detection while keeping the diversity order. Simulation results show that with the same throughput but a lower decoding and implementation complexity, our scheme can achieve superior performance than the conventional linear spreading schemes over either independent fading or additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels.