Single-Carrier Single-Block Differential Space–Frequency Coding Transmission Over the Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

In this paper, a single-carrier single-block differential space-frequency block coding scheme for multiple input multiple output frequency-selective fading channels is proposed. In the proposed scheme, an alternative constant modulus single-carrier transmission is adopted, which significantly mitigates the sensitivity to the nonlinear distortion while having comparable lower complexity to the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modulus. Based on this, subgrouping the signal transmit matrix through the block matrix method and fatherly differential space-frequency complex orthogonal coding on each subblocks, it not only transmits the differentially encoded signal matrix within one symbol block periods regardless of the number of transmit antennas, but also achieves the available spatial and frequency diversities without the requirement of multichannel estimation at the receiver. In the proposed scheme, it is only required that the fading channels keep approximately constant within each subblock during one symbol block transmission period, and thus can be more robust and effective to combat the channel rapidly fading with even lower bit error ratio. Theoretical analysis and corroborating simulation under various channel conditions shows that, our proposed scheme yields superior performance to previously proposed differential schemes.