Phase-Aligned Space-Time Coding for a Single Stream MIMO system

Abstract: We present a phase-aligned space-time coding scheme that expands the original Alamouti codeword to three or four transmit antennas ($N_t = 3$ or 4) with phase alignment. With $1 \sim 2$ bits feedback for the phase information, the fundamental performance penalty of $10log_{10}(N_t)$ dB of orthogonal space-time coding compared to the optimum beamforming is reduced by 1 dB (for $N_t=3$) or 2 dB (for $N_t = 4$) on average. With the proposed scheme, the full diversity order of $N_t$ is achievable, whereas the receiver architecture remains the same as the legacy Alamouti decoding with codeword size of two, since the spatial expansion is transparent to the receiver. Our results show the proposed scheme outperforms open-loop space-time coding for three or four transmit antennas by more than 3 dB.