Full diversity space-time block coding for linear receiver with low peak-to-average ratio

Recently, Shang and Xia (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 54(10), 4528-4547, 2008) introduced Overlapped Alamouti codes (OAC) and showed that OAC codes achieve full diversity when a linear receiver, zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver, is used. Unfortunately, OAC codes suffer from transmitting “zero-symbol” on all transmit antenna. The “zero-symbol” in the design results in high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and also imposes a severe constraint on hardware implementation of the code when turning off some of the transmitting antennas whenever a “zero-symbol” is transmitted. In this paper, we propose a new space-time block code (STBC) for linear receivers. The proposed STBC achieves all desirable properties of OAC codes as full diversity, high rate and group orthogonality. In addition, transmitting “zero-symbol” only occurs on half of transmit antenna instead of all transmit antenna as for OAC code. As a result, the proposed STBCs not only have lower PAPR, but also easier implementation than OAC codes. Moreover, simulation results also show that our codes outperform OAC codes under peak power constraint.