Complex orthogonal designs (CODs) of rate 1/2 have been considered recently for use in analog transmissions and as an alternative to maximum rate CODs due to the savings in decoding delay as the number of antennas increases. While algorithms have been developed to show that an upper bound on the minimum decoding delay for rate 1/2 CODs withn=2m-1 orn=2mcolumns is ν(n) = 2m-1 or ν(n) = 2m, depending on the parity ofnmodulo 8, it remains open to determine the exact minimum delay. This paper shows that this bound ν(n) is also a lower bound on minimum decoding delay for a major class of rate 1/2 CODs, named balanced complex orthogonal designs (BCODs), and that this is the exact minimum decoding delay for most BCODs. These rate 1/2 codes are conjugation-separated and thus permit a linearized description of the transceiver signal. BCODs also display other combinatorial properties that are expected to be useful in implementation, such as having no linear processing. An elegant construction is provided for a class of rate 1/2 CODs that have no zero entries, effectively no irrational coefficients, no linear processing, and have each variable appearing exactly twice per column. The resulting codes meet the aforementioned bound on decoding delay in most cases. This class of CODs will be useful in practice due to their low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and other desirable properties.

Complex orthogonal designs (CODs) have been successfully implemented in wireless systems as complex orthogonal space-time block codes (COSTBCs). Certain properties of the underlying CODs affect the performance of the codes. In addition to the main properties of a COD's rate and decoding delay, a third consideration is whether the COD can achieve transceiver signal linearization, a property that facilitates practical implementation by, for example, significantly simplifying the receiver structure for iterative decoding. It has been shown that a COD can achieve this transceiver signal linearization if the nonzero entries in any given row of the matrix are either all conjugated or all nonconjugated. This paper determines the conditions under which maximum rate CODs can achieve this desirable property. For an odd number of transmit antennas, it is shown that maximum rate CODs that achieve the lower bound on decoding delay can also achieve transceiver signal linearization. In contrast, for an even number of transmit antennas, maximum rate CODs that achieve the lower bound on delay cannot achieve this linearization. In this latter case, linearization is possible only if the COD achieves at least twice the lower bound on delay. This work highlights the tradeoffs among these three important properties.

Complex orthogonal space-time block codes (COSTBCs) based on generalized complex orthogonal designs (CODs) have been successfully implemented in wireless systems with multiple transmit antennas and single or multiple receive antennas. It has been shown that for a maximum rate COD with 2m-1 or 2m columns, a lower bound on decoding delay is (m-12m) and this delay is achievable when the number of columns is congruent to 0, 1 , or 3 modulo 4. In this paper, the final case is addressed, and it is shown that when the number of columns is congruent to 2 modulo 4, the lower bound on decoding delay cannot be achieved. In this case, the shortest decoding delay a maximum rate COD can achieve is twice the lower bound. New techniques for analyzing CODs are introduced with connections to binary vector spaces.

Constructions of square, maximum rate complex orthogonal space–time block codes (CO STBCs) are well known, however codes constructed via the known methods include numerous zeros, which impede their practical implementation. By modifying the Williamson and Wallis-Whiteman arrays to apply to complex matrices, we propose two methods of construction ofsquare, order-$4n$CO STBCs fromsquare, order-$n$codes which satisfy certain properties. Applying the proposed methods, we constructsquare,maximum rate, order-8 CO STBCs with no zeros, such that the transmitted symbols are equally dispersed through transmit antennas. Those codes, referred to as theimproved square CO STBCs, have the advantages that the power is equally transmitted via each transmit antenna during every symbol time slot and that a lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is required to achieve the same bit error rates as the conventional CO STBCs with zeros.

This letter proposes a simple but highly efficient technique to jointly utilize space, time, and polarization diversities. The technique is based on extending orthogonal space-time block codes into the quaternion domain and utilizing a description of the dual-polarized signal by means of quaternions, which are a generalization of complex numbers. In the given example, the achievable performance gain for two transmit and one receive antennas is approximately 6 dB at a bit error rate of 10-4when compared with the Alamouti code.

The growing demand for efficient wireless transmissions over fading channels motivated the development of space-time block codes. Space-time block codes built from generalized complex orthogonal designs are particularly attractive because the orthogonality permits a simple decoupled maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm while achieving full transmit diversity. The two main research problems for these complex orthogonal space-time block codes (COSTBCs) have been to determine for any number of antennas the maximum rate and the minimum decoding delay for a maximum rate code. The maximum rate for COSTBCs was determined by Liang in 2003. This paper addresses the second fundamental problem by providing a tight lower bound on the decoding delay for maximum rate codes. It is shown that for a maximum rate COSTBC for 2m - 1 or 2m antennas, a tight lower bound on decoding delay is r = (m-12m) . This lower bound on decoding delay is achievable when the number of antennas is congruent to 0, 1, or 3 modulo 4. This paper also derives a tight lower bound on the number of variables required to construct a maximum rate COSTBC for any given number of antennas. Furthermore, it is shown that if a maximum rate COSTBC has a decoding delay of r where rm-12m_).

Constructions of square, maximum rate complex orthogonal space-time block codes (CO STBCs) are well known, however codes constructed via the known methods include numerous zeros, which impede their practical implementation. By modifying the Williamson and Wallis-Whiteman arrays to apply to complex matrices, we propose two methods of construction or square, order-4n CO STBCs from square, order-n codes, which satisfy certain properties. Applying the proposed methods, we construct square, maximum rate, order-8 CO STBCs with no zeros, such that the transmitted symbols equally disperse through transmit antennas. Those codes, referred to as the improved square CO STBCs, have the advantages that the power is equally transmitted via each transmit antenna during every symbol time slot and that a lower peak-to-mean power ratio per each antenna is required to achieve the same bit error rates as for the conventional CO STBCs with zeros

Subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon (SSRS) codes were introduced by Hattori, McEliece, Solomo, and Lin in the mid-1990s. These authors found a complicated dimension formula and a simple, tight lower bound on the dimension of SSRS codes over F/sub 2//sup m/. We prove a conjecture of Hattori concerning how to identify subspaces that can be used to build SSRS codes whose dimension exceeds this lower bound.