Widely Linear MMSE Receivers for Linear Dispersion Space-Time Block-Codes

This paper proposes a new receiver structure for linear-dispersion (LD) codes, subsuming orthogonal, quasi-orthogonal and V-BLAST codes. We suggest to use widely-linear minimum-mean-squared-error (WL-MMSE) estimates of transmitted symbols in lieu of the sufficient statistics for maximum likelihood (ML) detection of these symbols. Proposed structure offers both optimal (ML) and suboptimal solutions. Simulation results show that the suboptimal receiver performs close to the optimal one, while reducing the receiver's complexity. Structure of the proposed receiver is particularly studied for orthogonal and quasi-orthogonal LD codes. Specifically, it is proved that Alamouti's combining scheme provides WL-MMSE estimates of the transmitted symbols.