Super-orthogonal space-time codes with rectangular constellations and two transmit antennas for high data rate wireless communications

We demonstrate super-orthogonal space-time (ST) trellis codes with rectangular signal constellations for wireless communications with a spectral efficiency of 4 bits/s/Hz. Considering a mobile wireless communications system with two transmit antennas, we form a 4D signal constellation as Cartesian product of two 2D rectangular signal sets, a 4D point being transmitted by the first antenna as two concatenated 2D points in two consecutive channel uses. The 2D symbols transmitted by the second antenna are not independent, but so chosen as to form, together with the symbols transmitted by the first antenna, the entries of a 2 times 2 orthogonal matrix. This can be done in four different ways, resulting in four sets of 2 times 2 orthogonal matrices. To obtain a higher data rate, the union of two of them forms a super-orthogonal signal set. With 2 times 2 orthogonal matrices, we then label the state transitions of a trellis diagram describing the operation of the encoder. We perform simulations using a model that takes into account the Doppler effect as well as the effect of spatial antenna correlation at both the base station (BS) and at the mobile station (MS). The frame error rate (FER) and the bit error rate (BER) performance results show an excellent behaviour of our proposed super-orthogonal ST trellis code, which clearly outperforms all known simple ST trellis codes of same spectral efficiency using 16QAM or 16PSK