An-Najah Staff

A quasi-orthogonal space time block coding (QO-STBC) scheme that exploits Hadamard matrix properties is studied and evaluated. At first, an analytical solution is derived as an extension of some earlier proposed QO-STBC scheme based on Hadamard matrices, called diagonalized Hadamard space-time block coding (DHSBTC). It explores the ability of Hadamard matrices that can translate into amplitude gains for a multi-antenna system, such as the QO-STBC system, to eliminate some off-diagonal (interference) terms that limit the system performance towards full diversity. This property is used in diagonalizing the decoding matrix of the QO-STBC system without such interfering elements. Results obtained quite agree with the analytical solution and also reflect the full diversity advantage of the proposed QO-STBC system design scheme. Secondly, the study is extended over an interference-free QO-STBC multi-antenna scheme, which does not include the interfering terms in the decoding matrix. Then, following the Hadamard matrix property advantages, the gain obtained (for example, in 4x1 QO-STBC scheme) in this study showed 4-times louder amplitude (gain) than the interference-free QO-STBC and much louder than earlier DHSTBC for which the new approach is compared with

In this paper, a simplified approach for implementing QO-STBC is proposed and evaluated with improved performance. It is based on the Hadamard matrix, in which the scheme exploits the Hadamard matrix property to attain full diversity. Hadamard matrix has the characteristic that diagonalizes a quasi-cyclic matrix and consequently, a decoding matrix so that a diagonal matrix which permits linear decoding is achieved. Using quasicyclic matrices in designing QO-STBC systems requires that the codes should be rotated to reasonably separate one code from another such that error floor in the design can be minimized. It will be shown that, orthogonalizing the secondary codes and then imposing the Hadamard criteria of the scheme can be well diagonalized. The results of this simplified approach demonstrate full diversity and better performance than the interference-free QO-STBC. Results show about 4 dB gain with respect to the interference-free QO-STBC scheme and it performs alike with the earlier Hadamard based QO-STBC designed with rotation. These results achieve the consequent mathematical proposition of the Hadamard matrix and its property is also shown in this study.