Two signaling schemes for improving the error performance of frequency division duplex (FDD) transmission systems using transmitter antenna diversity

We propose two signaling schemes that exploit the availability of multiple (N) antennas at the transmitter to provide diversity benefit to the receiver. This is typical of cellular radio systems where a mobile is equipped with only one antenna while the base station is equipped with multiple antennas. We further assume that the mobile-to-base and base-to-mobile channel variations are statistically independent and that the base station has no knowledge of the base-to-mobile channel characteristics. In the first scheme, a channel code of lengthN and minimum Hamming distanced _minN is used to encode a group ofK information bits. Channel code symbolc _i is transmitted with thei th antenna. At the receiver, a maximum likelihood decoder for the channel code provides a diversity ofd _min as long as each transmitted code symbol is subjected to independent fading. This can be achieved by spacing the transmit antennas several wavelengths apart. The second scheme introduces deliberate resolvable multipath distortion by transmitting the data-bearing signal with antenna 1, andN–1 delayed versions of it with antennas 2 throughN. The delays are unique to each antenna and are chosen to be multiples of the symbol interval. At the receiver, a maximum likelihood sequence estimator resolves the multipath in an optimal manner to realize a diversity benefit ofN. Both schemes can suppress co-channel interference. We provide code constructions and simulation results for scheme 1 to demonstrate its merit. We derive the receiver structure and provide a bound on the error probability for scheme 2 which we show to be tight, by means of simulations, for the nontrivial and perhaps the most interesting caseN=2 antennas. The second scheme is backward-compatible with two of the proposed digital cellular system standards, viz., GSM for Europe and IS-54 for North America.