Space-time block coding for time slotted CDMA systems with frequency-selective fading

The radio channel fading is one of the most important physical limitations for wireless mobile communications. Space-time coding is a coding technique that is designed for use with multiple transmit antennas and offers an effective transmit diversity technique to combat fading. However, most existing space-time coding schemes assume flat fading that may not be valid for wideband wireless mobile communication channels. In this paper, a novel space-time block coding scheme based on block processing is proposed for time slotted CDMA systems with frequency-selective fading. In order to get quasi-orthogonality, we encode the information based on the two data fields (blocks) of a burst, other than the symbols in a data field (block). As a consequence, it is convenient for block processing of joint detection which can be used with just some small modifications of the algorithms with no space-time coding. For decoding the new space time codes, block linear joint detection algorithms are developed. Then, we simplify these algorithms with an iterative procedure. With moderate iterative times, the computation complexity of the simplified algorithms is much less than that of the exact algorithms. Simulation results show that the performance of the simplified joint detection algorithms approximates to that of the exact ones.