A Simple Orthogonal Space-Time-Polarization Block Code

This letter proposes a simple but highly efficient technique to jointly utilize space, time, and polarization diversities. The technique is based on extending orthogonal space-time block codes into the quaternion domain and utilizing a description of the dual-polarized signal by means of quaternions, which are a generalization of complex numbers. In the given example, the achievable performance gain for two transmit and one receive antennas is approximately 6 dB at a bit error rate of 10^-4 when compared with the Alamouti code.