High-rate and full-diversity space-time block codes with low complexity partial interference cancellation group decoding

In this letter, we propose a systematic design of space-time block codes (STBC) which can achieve high rate and full diversity when the partial interference cancellation (PIC) group decoding is used at receivers. The proposed codes can be applied to any number of transmit antennas and admit a low decoding complexity while achieving full diversity. For M transmit antennas, in each codeword real and imaginary parts of PM complex information symbols are parsed into P diagonal layers and then encoded, respectively. With PIC group decoding, it is shown that the decoding complexity can be reduced to a joint decoding of M/2 real symbols. In particular, for 4 transmit antennas, the code has real symbol pairwise (i.e., single complex symbol) decoding that achieves full diversity and the code rate is 4/3. Simulation results demonstrate that the full diversity is offered by the newly proposed STBC with the PIC group decoding.