A Design of Space-Frequency Trellis Codes with High Rate and Full Diversity

This paper proposes high-rate full-diversity space-frequency trellis code (SFTC) designs for frequency selective fading channels, which achieve the full diversity advantage at the same transmission rate as the existing space-time block code (STBC) designs. The proposed codes are derived based on the concept of concatenated STBC and multiple trellis coded modulation (MTCM) encoder constructions. The existing space-frequency trellis code designs only provided small frequency diversity and coding gain advantages for the case in which the channel delay spread is small. Here, the proposed SFTC codes achieve larger coding gain and frequency diversity advantages than the existing SFTC designs. Simulation results show the proposed designs significantly outperform the existing space-frequency block code designs and the conventional SFTC designs