Design of space-time trellis codes for full spatial diversity

Space-time codes have been developed to answer the need for high data rates in future wireless communication systems. In this work, we propose a systematic code construction method that provides full diversity advantage for any number of transmit antennas, any number of encoder states, and any constellation. Our approach is to exploit the properties of the state transitions in the trellis to force the desired structure on the channel symbol difference matrix. The design rules do not specify the space-time codes completely, leaving room for further optimization for coding advantage.