An embedded space-time coding (STC) scheme for broadcasting

An embedded space-time coding method is proposed for wireless multimedia broadcast with heterogeneous receivers. In the proposed system, a transmitter sends out multi-layer source signals by encoding different layers with different space-time codes. Then, a receiver can retrieve a different amount of information depending on the number of its antennas. The receiver with only one antenna can decode only the base layer information with a low complexity while the receiver with more antennas can retrieve more layers of information. We also investigate a differential design of the embedded space-time system, which is used when the channel state information (CSI) is unknown to the receiver. Both analytic and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system. Differential detection with Kalman filtering is also investigated to help improve performance.