A Design of Space-Time Block Codes Achieving Full Diversity with Partial Interference Cancellation Group Decoding

A partial interference cancellation (PIC) group decoding based space-time block code (STBC) design criterion was recently proposed by Guo and Xia, where the decoding complexity and the code rate tradeoff is dealt when the full diversity is achieved. In this paper, a systematic design of STBC is proposed for any number of transmit antennas that can obtain full diversity when a PIC group decoding (with a particular grouping scheme) is applied at receiver. With the PIC group decoding and an appropriate grouping scheme for the decoding, the proposed STBC are shown to obtain the same diversity gain as the ML decoding, but have a much less decoding complexity compared to the ML decoding. Moreover, the code rate of the proposed full-diversity STBC can be up to 2, i.e., 2 symbols per channel use for an MIMO system with M transmit antennas when M is large. Some code design examples are given from the systematic code design approach. Simulation results show that the newly proposed STBC can obtain full diversity with the PIC group decoding over Rayleigh fading channels.