Signal space diversity techniques with fast decoding based on MDS codes

In wireless communication systems, signal space diversity techniques are usually adopted to combat channel fading by exploiting time diversity, frequency diversity, spatial diversity or a combination of them. Most existing schemes to achieve signal space diversity are based on linear constellation spreading. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear signal space diversity technique based on maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. The new technique provides a design flexibility for almost any number of diversity channels and desired diversity orders. We also propose a simple and suboptimal diversity channel selection (DCS) decoding for our new scheme. DCS decoding can greatly reduce the decoding complexity at a cost of marginal performance loss relative to the optimal detection while keeping the diversity order. Simulation results show that with the same throughput but a lower decoding and implementation complexity, our scheme can have superior performance than the optimal linear spreading schemes over either independent fading or additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels.