Quasi-orthogonal STBCs with embedded linear processing at the receiver

This paper presents a class of quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QOSTBCs) for any number of transmit antennas and any signal constellation. Signals are first transformed by a linear transformation before encoding. Then, the construction of QOSTBCs is presented based on the general construction of orthogonal STBCs (OSTBCs). The proposed QOSTBCs have rates higher than the rates of OSTBCs. Furthermore, linear processing at the receiver is embedded with the proposed codes and thus no further equalization technique is needed to cancel the cross interference. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed codes achieve a good performance if there is a large number of receive antennas.