Performance of perfect space-time codes under linear MMSE equalization and BLAST based decoding for large data rates

Space-time block codes which follow the perfect coding principle are a new class of full-rate linear-dispersion codes which are also fully diverse. These codes are therefore optimal in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff put forward by Zheng and Tse. However, this condition is dependent on the decoding method also being optimal, hence some form of maximum-likelihood decoding should be employed. For large multiple-input multiple-output arrays where latency and throughput are the limiting factors it is more practical to use linear equalization based receivers. In this paper we explore the effects of linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) based decoding with and without optimal ordering and symbol cancellation (BLAST) on various perfect space-time block codes up to 8 × 8 arrays both with and without channel coding for bits per channel-use up to 48. These results are compared to equivalent spatial multiplexing systems using the same linear de-multiplexing used in many state-of-the-art commercial systems.