Comparative Study of Open-loop Transmit Diversity Schemes for Four Transmit Antennas in Coded OFDM Systems

Abstract: We compare four open-loop transmit diversity schemes in a coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system with four transmit antennas, namely cyclic delay diversity (CDD), Space-Time Block Code (STBC, Alamouti code is used) with CDD, Quasi-Orthogonal STBC (QO-STBC) and Minimum-Decoding-Complexity QOSTBC (MDC-QOSTBC). We show that in a coded system with low code rate, a scheme with spatial transmit diversity of second order can achieve similar performance to that with spatial transmit diversity of fourth order due to the additional diversity provided by the phase shift diversity with channel coding. In addition, we also compare the decoding complexity and other features of the above four mentioned schemes, such as the requirement for the training signals, hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ), etc. The discussions in this paper can be readily applied to future wireless communication systems, such as mobile systems beyond 3G, IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, or IEEE 802.16 WiMAX, that employ more than two transmit antennas and OFDM.