Improved Balanced 2n-PSK STTCs for Any Number of Transmit Antennas from a New and General Design Method

Abstract

-Recently, it has been established that the best spacetime trellis codes (STTCs) belong to a specific class of codes. These codes are called "balanced STTCs" because they use the points of the MIMO constellation with the same probability. Therefore, the search of the best codes can be reduced to this class. This paper presents a new and general method to design 2 n -PSK balanced STTCs for any number of transmit antennas. This method is simpler than the first method, which was described only for 4-PSK modulation and can be generalized for any configuration of the space-time trellis encoder. Simulation results of new 4-PSK and 8-PSK balanced codes prove the importance of this class.