A Multi-Antenna Design Scheme based on Hadamard Matrices for Wireless Communications

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.