Trace-Orthonormal Full-Diversity Cyclotomic Space-Time Codes

In this paper, we consider the design of full diversity space-time codes for a coherent MIMO communication system. Starting from both the information theoretic and detection error viewpoints, we first establish that a desirable property for general linear dispersion (LD) codes is to have an inter-unitary as well as an intra-unitary structure – a structure we call traceorthonormality. By imposing the trace-orthonormal structure on a LD code and applying cyclotomic number theory, we establish, for an arbitrary number of transmitter and receiver antennas, a systematic and simple method to jointly design a unitary cyclotomic matrix, the Diophantine number and the corresponding constellation for a LD code. As a result, this enables us to construct full diversity rectangular cyclotomic LD codes with any symbol transmission rate less than or equal to the number of transmitter antennas. In addition, for the case when the number of transmitter antennas is greater than the number of receiver antennas, by taking advantage of the delay, we also arrive at the design of a special trace-orthonormal full diversity cyclotomic space-time block code which, for the number of transmitter antenna being equal to 2, can be proved to minimize the worst case pair-wise error probability of a maximum likelihood (ML) detector for a q-ary QAM signal constellation and therefore, achieves optimal coding gain. Computer simulations show that these codes have bit-error performance advantages over currently available codes.