Design of Differential Space-Time Trellis Codes

This paper presents the performance analysis and code design for differential space-time trellis code (DSTTC) when no channel state information (CSI) is available at neither the transmitter nor receiver. Upper bounds on the pairwise error probability of DSTTC over fast fading and quasi-static fading channels are derived and new design criteria are proposed based on these bounds. It is shown that the performance of DSTTC is determined by the minimum weighted square product distance (WSPD) over independent fast fading channels, and by the minimum cross correlation distance (CCD) over quasi-static fading channels. New DSTTCs are found by a systematic code search. Simulation results show that under the same spectral efficiency the proposed coding scheme has a superior performance and lower complexity compared to other existing differential space time coding schemes