Multiuser detection of alamouti signals

• Authors: Chee Wei Tan;A. Robert Calderbank
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Communications
• Year: 2009

In a MIMO multiple-access channel where users employ Space-Time Block Codes (STBC), interference cancellation can be used to suppress co-channel interference and recover the desired signal of each user at the receiver. Leveraging the special properties of Alamouti matrices, we first show that spatial multiplexing of Alamouti signals retains the space-time diversity gain of Alamouti signaling using our proposed low-complexity Alamouti BLAST-MMSE (A-BLAST) Algorithm. Next, in contrast to traditional transmit diversity that focuses on STBC construction at the transmitter, this paper looks at transmit diversity from the perspective of the receiver. In other words, the receiver gets to choose the STBC's, which are favourable to the channel assuming a fixed BLAST receive algorithm. In a multiuser MAC setting, we first present a systematic methodology to exploit different decomposition structure in Alamouti matrices, each with different tradeoff between performance and decoding complexity using possibly different MIMO receive algorithms. We then demonstrate that the notion of angles (the inner product of two quaternionic vectors) between multiuser channels determines the performance of MIMO receive algorithms. As an application of the general theory, we transform the decoding problem for several types of Quasi-Orthogonal STBC (QOSTBC) into multiuser detection of virtual Alamouti users. Building upon our A-BLAST Algorithm, we propose new algorithms for decoding single-user and multiuser QOSTBC. In particular, we show that bit error probability is a function of the quaternionic angle between virtual users (for a single user) or multiple users. This angle varies with the type of QOSTBC and leads to a new form of adaptive modulation called code diversity, where feedback instructs the transmitter how to choose from a plurality of codes.