Generalized ABBA Space-Time Block Codes

Linear space-time block codes (STBCs) of unitary rate and full diversity, systematically constructed over arbitrary constellations for any number of transmit antennas are introduced. The codes are obtained by generalizing the existing ABBA STBCs, a.k.a quasi-orthogonal STBCs (QO-STBCs). Furthermore, a fully orthogonal (symbol-by-symbol) decoder for the new generalized ABBA (GABBA) codes is provided. This remarkably low-complexity decoder relies on partition orthogonality properties of the code structure to decompose the received signal vector into lower-dimension tuples, each dependent only on certain subsets of the transmitted symbols. Orthogonal decodability results from the nested application of this technique, with no matrix inversion or iterative signal processing required. The exact bit-error-rate probability of GABBA codes over generalized fading channels with maximum likelihood (ML) decoding is evaluated analytically and compared against simulation results obtained with the proposed orthogonal decoder. The comparison reveals that the proposed GABBA solution, despite its very low complexity, achieves nearly the same performance of the bound corresponding to the ML-decoded system, especially in systems with large numbers of antennas.