Spatial multiplexing by spatiotemporal spreading: receiver considerations

The use of multiple transmit and receive antennas allows to transmit multiple signal streams in parallel and hence to increase communication capacity. Apart from capacity, the MIMO channel also offers potentially a large number of diversity sources. To exploit these diversity degrees, and hence enhance outage capacity, bit interleaved coded modulation is now a classical solution. In this paper we propose to exploit the diversity sources by linear precoding, to turn the fading channel into a non-fading one. Additional channel coding then only serves to enhance robustness against noise. To streamline the processing and analysis, the linear precoding considered here is convolutional instead or blockwise. We particularly focus in this paper on two non-iterative receiver strategies. Performance improvements are shown over conventional VBLAST.