The Theory of Quaternion Orthogonal Designs

Over the past several years, there has been a renewed interest in complex orthogonal designs for their application in space-time block coding. Motivated by the success of this application, this paper generalizes the definition of complex orthogonal designs by introducing orthogonal designs over the quaternion domain. This paper builds a theory of these novel quaternion orthogonal designs, offers examples, and provides several construction techniques. These theoretical results, along with the results of preliminary simulations, lay the foundation for developing applications of these designs as orthogonal space-time-polarization block codes.