Combining Galois with complex field coding for high-rate space-time communications

A joint scheme combining error-control coding (ECC) with complex-field coding (CFC) is proposed for space-time communications through flat or frequency-selective fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. It is shown that the diversity gain of this joint coding scheme is the product of the free distance of the ECC, the complex-field block encoder size, and the number of receive antennas, which is computationally difficult to achieve using ECC alone. For two antennas, the scheme can achieve the same performance as the Alamouti (1998) scheme with coding. We also present some high rate transmission schemes that can achieve maximum diversity at a rate higher than one symbol per channel use.