Diversity Combining via Universal Orthogonal Space-Time Transformations

Receiver diversity combining methods play a key role in combating the detrimental effects of fadingin wireless communication and other applications. A novel diversity combining method is proposedwhere a universal, i.e., channel independent, orthogonal dimension-reducing space-time transformationis applied prior to quantization of the signals. The scheme may be considered as the counterpart ofAlamouti modulation, and more generally of orthogonal space-time block codes.