An efficient space-frequency coding scheme over unknown frequency-selective fading channels

This paper investigates space-frequency (SF) coding for non-coherent (NC) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) fading links, where neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows the channel. Our strategy consists in distributing the convolutional encoded and interleaved bits over the different transmit antennas, OFDM tones and OFDM symbols. The combination of the convolutional coding and bit interleaving with the SF coding can exploit the maximum spatial/frequency diversity over frequency-selective channels. In order to reduce the decoding complexity, we divide the OFDM symbol into several groups and apply differential encoding and decoding between adjacent groups. The proposed NC SF matrix is designed as a combination of a differential Cayley code and a systematic NC SF code, which leads to a simple decoding rule over the multipath channel. We show through asymptotic Pairwise Error Probability (PEP) analysis and simulation results that our encoding strategy can provide full diversity gain and achieves better performance in terms of spectrum efficiency and symbol error rate than all three the systematic NC-SF coding, the Cayley differential SF coding and our proposed SF coding without convolutional encoding and bit interleaving.