Spatio-temporal coding for wireless communication

Multipath signal propagation has long been viewed as an impairment to reliable communication in wireless channels. This paper shows that the presence of multipath greatly improves achievable data rate if the appropriate communication structure is employed. A compact model is developed for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dispersive spatially selective wireless communication channel. The multivariate information capacity is analyzed. For high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, the MIMO channel can exhibit a capacity slope in bits per decibel of power increase that is proportional to the minimum of the number multipath components, the number of input antennas, or the number of output antennas. This desirable result is contrasted with the lower capacity slope of the well-studied case with multiple antennas at only one side of the radio link. A spatio-temporal vector-coding (STVC) communication structure is suggested as a means for achieving MIMO channel capacity. The complexity of STVC motivates a more practical reduced-complexity discrete matrix multitone (DMMT) space–frequency coding approach. Both of these structures are shown to be asymptotically optimum. An adaptive-lattice trellis-coding technique is suggested as a method for coding across the space and frequency dimensions that exist in the DMMT channel. Experimental examples that support the theoretical results are presented.