| This thesis has two main contributions: the designs of differential/non-differential unitary space-time codes for multiple-antenna systems and the analysis of the diversity gain when using space-time coding among nodes in wireless networks.; Capacity has long been a bottleneck in wireless communications. Recently, multiple-antenna techniques have been used in wireless communications to combat the fading effect, which improves both the channel capacity and performance greatly. A recently proposed method for communicating with multiple antennas over block-fading channels is unitary space-time modulation, which can achieve the channel capacity at high SNR. However, it is not clear how to generate well performing unitary space-time codes that lend themselves to efficient encoding and decoding. In this thesis, the design of unitary space-time codes using Cayley transform is proposed. The codes are designed based on an information-theoretic criterion and have a polynomial-time near-maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm. Simulations suggest that the resulting codes allow for effective high-rate data transmissions in multiple-antenna communication systems without knowing the channel. Another well-known transmission scheme for multiple-antenna systems with unknown channel information at both the transmitter and the receiver is differential unitary space-time modulation. It can be regarded as a generalization of DPSK and is suitable for continuous fading. In differential unitary space-time modulation, fully diverse constellations, i.e., sets of unitary matrices whose pairwise differences are non-singular, are wanted for their good pairwise error properties. In this thesis, Lie groups and their representations are used in solving the design problem. Fully diverse differential unitary space-time codes for systems with four and three transmit antennas are constructed based on the Lie groups Sp(2) and SU(3). The designed codes have high diversity products, lend themselves to a fast maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm, and simulation results show that they outperform other existing codes, especially at high SNR.; Then the idea of space-time coding devised for multiple-antenna systems is applied to communications over wireless networks. In wireless relay networks, the relay nodes encode the signals they receive from the transmit node into a distributed space-time code and transmit the encoded signals to the receive node. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
