A Family of Hybrid Space-Time Codes for MIMO Wireless Communications

Hybrid MIMO space-time codes combine the benefits of spatial multiplexing with diversity gain to achieve both high spectral efficiency and link reliability. In this paper, we present a family of hybrid codes, known as LD STBC-VBLASTcodes, along with a receiver architecture suitable for low-complexity hardware implementation. We show that, under Rayleigh fading, the performance of LD STBC-VBLAST codes is superior to other recently proposed hybrid codes. We also present a technique to derive, from a given propagation scenario, spatially correlated MIMO channel models adequate for space-time coding performance analysis. Using this technique, we evaluate the performance of LD STBC-VBLAST codes under several correlated channels.