Last-generation and future wireless communication standards, such as DVB-T2 or DVB-NGH, are including multi-antenna transmission and reception in order to increase bandwidth efficiency and receiver robustness. The main goal is to combine diversity and spatial multiplexing in order to fully exploit the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel capacity. Full-rate full-diversity (FRFD) space-time codes (STC) such as the Golden code are studied for that purpose. However, despite their larger achievable capacity, most of them present high complexity for soft detection, which hinders their combination with soft-input decoders in bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) schemes. This article presents a novel low-complexity soft detection algorithm for the reception of FRFD space-frequency block codes in BICM orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed detector maintains a reduced and fixed complexity, avoiding the variable nature of the list sphere decoder (LSD) due to its dependence on the noise and channel conditions. Complexity and simulation-based performance results are provided which show that the proposed detector performs close to the optimal log-maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection in a variety of DVB-T2 broadcasting scenarios.

Recent and next-generation wireless broadcasting standards, such as DVB-T2 or DVB-NGH, are considering distributed multi-antenna transmission in order to increase bandwidth efficiency and signal quality. Full-rate full-diversity (FRFD) space-time codes (STC), such as the Golden code, have been reported to be excellent candidates, being their main drawback their detection complexity, which is enhanced when soft output is required when combined with a bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) scheme based on low-density parity check (LDPC) codes. We present a novel low-complexity soft detection algorithm for the reception of Golden codes in LDPC based orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Complexity and simulation-based performance results are provided which show that the proposed detector performs close to the optimal detector in a variety of DVB-T2 broadcasting scenarios.