Design of high-rate unequal diversity space-time code for Multimedia transmission

In order to support applications with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in Multimedia communication, this paper designs and investigates a kind of high rate unequal diversity (HRUD) code based on the quasi-orthogonal spacetime block code (QO-STBC) for transmission. This code can achieve high rate, and also provide unequal error protection for multiple layers simultaneously. When transmit antennas N_T = 2, receive antennas N_R = 2 or 3 are deployed, according to the design strategy, we give two examples of HRUD codes. The code with rate of two can provide two different levels of diversity gain, and the code with rate of three can provide three different levels of diversity gain. The simulation results show that the proposed codes significantly outperform the V-BLAST system in terms of BER performance with the same transmit antennas or the same spectral efficiency.