Full-rate full-diversity space-frequency block coding for digital TV broadcasting

The goal of the future terrestrial and mobile digital video broadcasting standards is to combine diversity and spatial multiplexing in order to fully exploit the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel capacity. Full-rate full-diversity (FR-FD) space-time codes (STC) such as the Golden code, that maximize the rate preserving the diversity gain, are studied for that purpose. Most of them present a high-complexity detection problem which results in a handicap for their hardware implementation. Therefore, we analyze the performance of a sub-optimal full-rate full-diversity 2×2 STC, whose design reduces the complexity of the detection, as an alternative for future MIMO broadcasting TV systems. The assessment of the proposed STC code is carried out over the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) scheme of DVB-T2 system which includes low-density parity check (LDPC) codes for error correction. Finally, soft STC list detection is studied in order to generate soft information for LDPC decoding.