Generalized block space-time trellis codes: set-partitioning and code design

We develop algorithms to efficiently build trellises for various full-rate MIMO codes. By full-rate, we refer to codes for multiple antenna systems whose rate scales with the minimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas, e.g., BLAST and the linear dispersion codes of Hassibi and Hochwald. This is in part inspired by the so-called super-orthogonal codes, which build efficient trellises on orthogonal block space-time codes (e.g. the Alamouti code). Unfortunately that approach cannot be directly transferred to a code with insufficient structure, because set partitioning over an irregular set, such as the one represented by an arbitrary space-time code, is not straightforward. The central contribution of this paper is an efficient set partitioning algorithm for an arbitrary set. We then built trellises for the resulting set partitions and demonstrate via simulations the gains obtained by such trellis codes.