Linear Pre-Whitening Detector for Space-Time Block Codes over Time-Selective Fading Channels

Most work on space-time block codes (STBC) assumes block fading. However, time selectivity does exists in practise for codes with big block length. In this paper, we propose a linear pre-whitening filter based signal detector for STBC when the channel changes within the coding block. The main idea is to utilize the principle of a pre-whitening filter to realize single symbol detection, virtual single input and single output (SISO), by removing the effects of past decisions. Both analytical and simulation results show that our scheme can provide performance very close to ML decoding with extremely low computational complexity. Extension to V-BLAST is given in order to make the proposed detector applicable to other MIMO schemes.