On full diversity linear dispersion codes with partial interference cancellation group decoding

In this paper, we propose a partial interference cancellation (PIC) group decoding for linear dispersive space-time block codes (STBC) and a design criterion for the codes to achieve full diversity when the PIC group decoding is used at the receiver. A PIC group decoding decodes the symbols embedded in an STBC by dividing them into several groups and decoding each group separately after a linear PIC operation is implemented. It can be viewed as an intermediate decoding between the maximum likelihood (ML) receiver that decodes all the embedded symbols together, i.e., all embedded symbols are in a single group, and a zero-forcing (ZF) receiver that decodes all the embedded symbols separately and independently, i.e., each group has and only has one embedded symbol, after the ZF operation is implemented. The PIC group decoding provides a framework to adjust the complexity-performance tradeoff by choosing the sizes of the symbol groups. Our proposed design criterion (group independence) for the PIC group decoding to achieve full diversity is an intermediate condition between the loosest ML full rank criterion of codewords and the strongest ZF linear independence condition of the column vectors in the equivalent channel matrix. A design example is also given.