This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts

for publication in the IEEE ICC 2010 proceedings

Three-Time-Slot Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes

Zhongding Lei, Chau Yuen, and Francois Chin
Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
AbstractIn this paper, a class of quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (Q-STBC) is proposed for systems with 2 antennas and 3 time slots, where the orthogonal Alamouti code can not be applied due to the odd, also known as Orphan, symbol problem inherited in the 3GPP frame structure. The proposed codes can achieve rate one and full diversity with lower complexity maximum likelihood detection. The design also takes into consideration other issues, such as the power fluctuation, the compatibility with single antenna transmission mode, the receiver and transmitter complexity etc. Index Terms Space time block coding, spatial diversity, fading

I.

INTRODUCTION

pace-time block coding (STBC) is an efficient transmit diversity scheme to combat detrimental effects of wireless fading channels because of its simple decoding algorithm accomplishing full diversity at a radio receiver. Alamouti code is an elegant and seminal STBC design for a two-transmitantenna system [1]. It achieves full-rate, i.e. rate one, fulldiversity transmission using two time slots for signals with complex constellations, which are employed in most current commercial wireless systems. The orthogonal code design from Tarokh et al is a generalization of Alamouti code for systems with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas [2][3]. It has been proved however, the orthogonal design for complex signals with linear decoding complexity achieving full-rate full-diversity transmission is not available for the number of antennas more than two [2]. The system with higher number of antennas has to either suffer from rate loss or put up with more decoding complexity. Quasi-orthogonal STBC (Q-STBC) codes are typical designed for more than two antenna systems with increased, but not exponentially, decoding complexity [4]-[6]. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a standard body standardizing cellular systems worldwide with most telecommunication manufacturers / vendors / operators involved. Recently, 3GPP has been working on the next generation wireless system (4G) under the project LTEAdvanced building upon the legacy standard LTE release 8 [7]. With the minimum requirement of two transmit antennas imposed to the user equipment (UE, i.e. mobile station) in LTE-Advanced systems, STBC is the most popular candidate for the uplink transmission diversity scheme [8]. However, it has been identified afterwards that the LTE frame structure, which has been fixed and not likely to be changed makes it awkward to implement an orthogonal STBC design. The time slots (or symbols per slot in 3GPP language) in the frame structure for data transmission is not guaranteed to be an even

number. In many cases, there are 3 time slots available for data transmission instead of 2 time slots as required in the orthogonal STBC for a two antenna UE [7][9]. This has brought up an interesting STBC design problem to achieve full-rate transmission with three time slots and two antennas. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such STBC code design available, including Q-STBC in the literature. In [9], an alternative hybrid scheme with 2-time-slot STBC followed by one-time-slot repetition transmission has been proposed. The hybrid transmission scheme achieves reasonable performance with simple linear decoding at the receiver. However, it is not a full-diversity transmission scheme overall as the one-slot repetition transmission does not provide any diversity gain. Inevitably, it suffers from significant performance loss as opposed to the orthogonal STBC transmission. In this paper, we propose a new set of STBC codes for the 3-time-slot and 2-antenna transmission. The proposed codes can achieve full-rate full diversity transmission and thus have much better performance than the hybrid scheme in [9]. The paper is organized as follows. The design problem is formulated in Section II. The proposed design is elaborated in Section III. The decoding complexity is analyzed in Section IV, followed by the simulation results in Section IV. The paper is concluded in Section V.

II. PROBLEM FORMULATION Fig. 1 illustrates the radio frame of uplink transmission in LTE systems. Each radio frame is 10 ms long with 10 subframes or 20 transmission units1. Each transmission unit lasts 0.5 ms consisting of either 7 symbols in the normal cyclicprefix mode or 6 symbols in the extended cyclic-prefix mode. One or two of the 7 or 6 symbols per transmission unit will be taken up by Demodulation Reference Signal (DRS) and Sounding Reference Signal (SRS) as shown (shaded symbols) in the figure. The remaining symbols will be used for data transmission. From the figure it can be seen that each transmission unit always, be it in the normal cyclic-prefix mode or the extended cyclic-prefix mode, contains odd number of (3 symbols) time duration (or slot in STBC context). Alamouti code is designed for 2 transmission slot for wireless systems equipped with two antennas. Unfortunately, they are not applicable to the systems with time slot restriction as described above. To achieve full-rate transmission, an alternative hybrid scheme has been proposed in [9], which is exemplified in Fig. 2 with 3 transmission time-slot and 2
1

The transmission unit refers to the term slot in 3GPP. We use the term transmission unit to avoid confusion of the slot concept in STBC

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antennas. During the first 2 time slots, signals are transmitted following exactly the Alamouti code, whereas in the 3rd time slot, the signal transmitted on the 2nd antenna is a simple repetition of that on the 1st antenna. The hybrid transmission scheme achieves reasonable performance with simple linear decoding at the receiver. However, it is not a full-diversity transmission scheme overall as the one-slot repetition transmission does not provide any diversity gain. Inevitably, it suffers from significant performance loss as opposed to orthogonal STBC transmission. In this paper, we will design a class of Q-STBC codes achieving full-rate full-diversity transmission. It outperforms the hybrid transmission scheme significantly.

Fig. 1 Frame structure of LTE uplink

Fig. 2 A hybrid 3-slot transmission scheme

where one of the data slot transmission only achieves a diversity order of 1 defining the poorer performance. We will meet this criterion by ensuring the transmitted STBC design matrix, which will be elaborated later, full rank (rank two) for any distinct code sequence [10][3]. The 3rd criterion refers to the backward compatibility to the single antenna system. This is not always a requirement in many orthogonal/non-orthogonal STBC designs, such as [3], [4] or [6]. However, it is a desired feature and could be a decisive factor for a STBC code design to be adopted in a practical wireless system. In many commercial systems such as 3GPP, WiMax, WLAN etc., STBC transmission is only one of the transmission modes at the transmitter. The transmitter usually transmits in one of the multiple transmission modes at a time adapting to channel conditions, the user QoS requirement, and the resource availability etc. The backward compatibility ensures a smooth transition, in terms of overhead signaling and implementation complexity, between STBC modes and the single antenna mode. In our STBC design, we will impose that all the transmission from the 1st antenna will be exactly the same as that in the single antenna system. The 4th criterion is addressing the issue of the decoding complexity at the receiver side [10]. As the full-rate fulldiversity transmission with linear decoding complexity is proved to be impossible [3], we will design Q-STBC codes for low-complexity implementation of maximum likelihood (ML) detection (but a bit higher than linear complexity as in orthogonal codes cases). The 5th criterion is addressing the encoding complexity at the transmitter side. It is preferable to have as low complexity as possible. Therefore, we will limit our Q-STBC transmission on the 2nd antenna to be a linear combination of the transmission on the 1st antenna. The 6th criterion is imposed to minimize the signal power fluctuation at the transmitter side. Similar to the 3rd criterion, this is a concern when come to the implementation of transmitters, especially for uplink. A less fluctuation of signal power will have smaller dynamic range and less demanding on the high linearity and costly analogue radio frequency components, such as power amplifiers [11]. Therefore, we will ensure the STBC transmission to be fixed average power during each time slot.

In the proposed STBC design for the 3-time slot transmission, the following criteria/conditions are considered: 1) Full rate (3 symbols transmitted in 3 time slots) 2) Full diversity (order 2 with 2 transmit antennas) 3) Backward compatibility 4) Receiver complexity 5) Transmitter complexity 6) Power fluctuation The 1st criterion ensures that there will be no data rate loss employing STBC. We will meet this criterion by transmitting 3 data symbols during the 3 slot times. The 2nd criterion is to guarantee the superior performance of the designed STBC with 2 order of diversity as opposed to the hybrid scheme,

Fig. 3 Proposed 3-slot transmission scheme

Fig. 3 shows a schematic drawing of the STBC design. Three data symbols are transmitted consecutively during the 3 time slots, i.e., x1 , x2 , x3 (1st criterion above). On the 1st antenna, the data symbols are transmitted with fixed power

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(6th criterion) or E (| x1 |2 ) = E (| x2 |2 ) = E (| x3 |2 ) = 1 and in the same format as in the case of single antenna to keep the backward compatibility (3rd criterion). On the 2nd antenna, the data symbols y1 , y2 , y3 are transmitted consecutively in the 3 time slots. To keep a linear complexity at the transmitter side (criterion 5), we restrict the data symbols y1 , y2 , y3 linear combinations of the transmitted symbols on the 1st antenna, which can be represented mathematically as

fulfill the following constraints:

* * * a11a12 + a 21a 22 + a31a32 =0 * * * a11a13 + a 21a 23 + a31a33 = 0 a12 + a 21 = 0 a13 + a31 = 0

(4)

y = A x*
where

(1) ,

These constraints are derived from the cost function of joint ML decoding of x1 , x2 , x3 . It can be verified that the joint ML decoding cost function with respect to x1 , x2 , x3 will be decoupled into 2 groups, one with x1 and the other with

y = [ y1

y2

y 3 ]T

x = [ x1

x2

x 3 ]T a 2i

A = [ a1
is the i
T i

a2
th

a3 ] = [ b1

b2

b 3 ]T , a i = [ a1i

a 3i ] T

x2 , x3 , as long as the equation (4) is satisfied and regardless of

the channel. That is to say we need only a lower-complexity joint decoding of x2 , x3 to achieve ML decoding for all 3 symbols. The decoding complexity for x1 is linear. It is notable that the equation (4), which is corresponding to decoupling x1 and x2 , x3 , is easily adapted to similar forms in order to decouple x2 and x1 , x3 or decouple x3 and x1 , x2 . To meet the 6th criterion as discussed above, we have additional set of equations as follows to shape the design matrix and ensure the STBC transmission with fixed average power during each time slot.
* * * a11a11 + a12 a12 + a13 a13 =c * * * a 21a 21 + a 22 a 22 + a 23 a 23 = c a a* + a a* + a a* = c 32 32 33 33 31 31

b = [ a i1

column of the 3-by-3 complex matrix A and ai 2 ai 3 ] is the ith row of A and * denotes the

conjugate operation. Stacking the transmitted symbols on 2 antennas in a matrix, the proposed STBC codes have a general form of

xT x X = T = 1 y y1

x2 y2

x3 x1 = T * y3 b1 x

x2 T * b2 x

x3 (2) T * b3 x

Now we show that the STBC code design problem can be transformed into the design of the complex matrix A. It is notable that the 1st and 3rd design criteria are met automatically as long as x1 , x2 , x3 are representing three transmitted data symbols. To meet the full diversity criterion (2nd criterion), the codeword difference matrix X = X(1) X(2) should be fullrank (rank 2) [10], or equivalently,

(5)

xT x* det( XX H ) = det T * y x

xT y* 0 y T y*

(3)

where X(1) and X(2) are two distinct codeword matrixes as in (2), x is the codeword difference c (1) c ( 2 ) , c (1) and c (2) are any two distinct code words and det(.) denotes the determinant of a matrix. Since the number of code words c (1) and c (2) are finite and exhaustible, we may use (3) to screen potential STBC codes to ensure full diversity. As orthogonal STBC codes achieving ML detection with linear decoding complexity is not possible for 3-time-slot transmission, we consider Q-STBC codes, where the ML decoding of the 3 transmitted symbols can be decoupled. Our target is to decouple the decoding of one symbol from that of the other 2 symbols so that we need only do a joint ML decoding for 2 symbols, instead of 3 symbols. We will lower the ML decoding complexity by one exponential order. For example, the decoding searching set will be reduced by 4, 16 and 64 times for QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM respectively. To achieve the decoupling of decoding one symbol for the others, we may restrict the elements of the designing matrix to

where c is the average transmission power in one slot. Without loss of generality, we will set c=1 in the remaining of the paper. In a summary to our STBC design, our proposed Q-STBC codes is in the format of (2) with parameters aij (i, j = 1, 2, 3) , being solutions to the equations (4) and (5), subject to the constraint in (3). It is worthwhile mentioning that there is one implied condition by (3), (4) and (5). That is a ij 0 for any i, j {1, 2,3} . It can be verified that any zero entry in the design matrix A will lead to a deficient rank in (3).

III. PROPOSED Q-STBC CODES As formulated in last section, our proposed Q-STBC codes are the solutions to the equations (4) and (5) subject to the conditions (3). Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to find a complete set of solutions. The condition (3) involves a fourth-order multivariate polynomial and is a non-convex function. Solving the multivariate quadratic equations (4) and (5) is an NP-hard problem in general. In the following, we will impose an additional set of conditions to the problem so as to find a set of solutions analytically. It is

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notable that this set of the solutions is a subset of the solutions to the original problem. However, this does not diminish the importance of our findings for the Q-STBC code design, as one single solution is sufficient to solve the problem. To obtain the potential solutions, we have further limited our solutions with the design matrices having equal-amplitude diagonal elements, i.e.
* * * a11a11 = a 22 a 22 = a33 a33 =

where pinv() stands for the pseudo-inverse function. Substituting (11) into (2) we have an exemplary of the QSTBC design as

x1 X= j 2 * x1* +2e j 25 x* 5 x 2 +2e 3 3

It is noted that

x2
2e
j 2 * j * 5 x +e 5 x +2 x* 1 2 3

(12) j 2 * j * * 2e 5 x1 +2 x2 +e 5 x3 3 x3

(6)

After tedious analysis and manipulations, we have given directly the solution sets to equations (4), (5), and (6) arranged in the form of the design matrix as

substituting (7) with varying T = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] determined through (8) can produce an infinite number of such STBC codes. All the codes generated fulfill all the design criteria set forth in Section II.

e j1 j 2 A=1 3 2e 2e j3

2 e j 2 e 2e j6
j 4

2e j3 2 e j 5 e j 7

IV. DECODING OF THE PROPOSED Q-STBC CODES (7) To illustrate the decoding complexity of the proposed STBC codes with ML performance, we will derive the decision metric used for the ML detection for a single antenna receiver as follows. Assuming the channel is quasi static and flat-faded. The random path gains h = [ h1

where 1 , 2 7 are the phase parameters of the design matrix. They must fulfill the following conditions derived from the process of solving our design equations

h2 ] , where h1 and h2
T

T =
where = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] , = [0 0 - ] and
T

(8)
T

correspond to the gains from the two transmit antennas respectively, are constant over 3-slot transmission period. The received signal r can be represented as

r = XT h + n

(13)

1 1 T= 1 1

1 2 1 0

1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 1

(9)

where the complex random Gaussian noise vector n is independent with zero-mean. Assuming perfect channel knowledge at the receiver, the ML decision metric is

r XT h

(14)

As the matrix T in (9) is full rank (rank 4), there are infinite T choices of = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ] (solutions to the underdetermined equation (8)). A simple such example would be

= pinv(T) = [0
2 5

The ML decoding is to find the optimal X amongst all the possibilities which minimizing the metric (14). Noticing the properties (4) and (5) in the proposed design matrix, the ML decoding metric (14) can be expanded as a sum of two items, with X substituted with (2), the removal of irrelevant items and some further manipulations,

- 25

- 5

0 0

T 5

(10)

r X T h = f1 ( x1 ) + f 23 ( x2 , x3 )
where

(15)

leading to the design matrix (substituting (10) into (7)(11))

1 2 j 5 2 e A=1 3 2 j 5 2 e

2e e

2 5

2e

2 5

2 e
j

f1 ( x1 ) = h1 + h2 1 x1
2 2

(11)

+ x12 + h1*h2 a11 x1

) + x (h r + h r a )
1 * 1 1 H 2 1

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f 23 ( x2 , x3 ) = x2 x3 + h1*h2 (a23 + a32 ) x2

x3

(( h + h 1) x ) + ( x +h h a x )
+
2 2 2 1 2 j j = 2,3 2 j * 1 2 2 4 jj j j = 2,3 * H + x j rj h1 + h2 r a j j = 2,3

diversity order of 2 as Alamouti code and its performance far exceed the hybrid transmission scheme, especially at higher SNR. The performance gap between the proposed STBC and the benchmark Alamouti codes is due to the fact that Alamouti code is an orthogonal design (does not exist for 3-slot transmission however) with a higher coding gain whereas the proposed STBC is quasi-orthogonal.

VI. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, a class of quasi-orthogonal STBC code design has been proposed for 3-slot transmission. The STBC design achieves full-rate full-diversity transmission with superior performance. The maximum likelihood decoding complexity of the designed codes can be reduced to one-dimension lower, a few to a few ten times lower for the popular modulation QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM respectively. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors are grateful for the initial survey on the uplink transmit-diversity schemes in 3GPP conducted by Dr. Edward Au and discussions with Mr. Sai Ho Wong, Dr. Wei Ying Lim, Dr. Tony Quek, and Dr. Yong Huat Chew. REFERENCES

As f1 is independent of x2 and x3 and f 23 is independent of x1 , the minimization of (14) is equivalent to minimizing f1 and f 23 independently. This reduces the complexity of decoding without sacrificing the performance.

V. SIMULATIONS We have conducted numerical simulations to evaluate the performance of the designed Q-STBC codes. We use the STBC code shown in (12) for example. We have run for 300 QPSK symbols data transmission for each one of 10000 2transmit-1-receive channel realizations.
QPSK Proposed Hybrid Alamouti Single ant

10

-1

[1]

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

10

-5

10 SNR (dB)

15

20

Fig. 4 Performance comparison for 3-slot transmissions

The simulation results for the simple flat fading cases have been plotted in Fig. 4. For comparison, we have included the performance of the hybrid transmission scheme [9], together with the benchmark performance of single antenna transmission and Alamouti STBC transmission. As can be seen from Fig. 4, the proposed STBC design reveals the same

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