Noncoherent Bit-Interleaved Coded OSTBC-OFDM with Maximum Spatial-Frequency Diversity

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications 2012-09, Vol.11 (9), p.3335-3347
• Main Authors: Ye Yang, Tsung-Hui Chang, Wing-Kin Ma, Jianhua Ge, Chong-Yung Chi, Ching, P. C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM); Channel estimation; Coding, codes; Convolutional codes; Decoding; diversity; Exact sciences and technology; Fading; Information, signal and communications theory; maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding; Modulation, demodulation; Multiplexing; noncoherent decoding; OFDM; orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM); orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC); Receivers; Signal and communications theory; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); Vectors
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2012.071612.111936

The combination of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM), orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been shown recently to be able to achieve maximum spatial-frequency diversity in frequency selective multi-path fading channels, provided that perfect channel state information (CSI) is available to the receiver. In view of the fact that perfect CSI can be obtained only if a sufficient amount of resource is allocated for training or pilot data, this paper investigates pilot-efficient noncoherent decoding methods for the BICM-OSTBC-OFDM system. In particular, we propose a noncoherent maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder that uses only one OSTBC-OFDM block. This block-wise decoder is suitable for relatively fast fading channels whose coherence time may be as short as one OSTBC-OFDM block. Our focus is mainly on noncoherent diversity analysis. We study a class of carefully designed transmission schemes, called perfect channel identifiability (PCI) achieving schemes, and show that they can exhibit good diversity performance. Specifically, we present a worst-case diversity analysis framework to show that PCI-achieving schemes can achieve the maximum noncoherent spatial-frequency diversity of BICM-OSTBC-OFDM. The developments are further extended to a distributed BICM-OSTBC-OFDM scenario in cooperative relay networks. Simulation results are presented to confirm our theoretical claims and show that the proposed noncoherent schemes can exhibit near-coherent performance.