Turbo-BLAST: A novel technique for multi-transmit and multi-receive wireless communications

Abstract

<p>Wireless communications technology is presently undergoing a tremendous expansion, which is brought on by the proliferation of many diverse and very compelling applications. These trends are continually pushing the demand for substantially increased information capacity, which can only be realized through the development of novel communication techniques. In this context, we may mention a ground-breaking wireless communication technique that offers a tremendous potential to increase the information capacity of the channel, namely, the multi-transmit and multi-receive (MTMR) antenna system, which is popularized as the Bell-Labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST) architecture. In particular, the Diagonal-BLAST (D-BLAST) and the Vertical-BLAST (V-BLAST), developed by Bell labs of Lucent Technologies, permit signal processing complexity to grow linearly, with the capacity increase being made possible through the use of a large number of transmit and receive antennas. However, from a practical perspective, D-BLAST is inefficient for short packet transmissions due to its boundary space-time wastage. Meanwhile, V-BLAST suffers from error propagation due to deep fades in the wireless channel. In this thesis, we propose Turbo-BLAST, a novel multi-transmit and multi-receive antenna system that can handle any configuration of transmit and receive antennas. It presents a framework of simple yet highly effective random space-time transmission and iterative joint-decoding receivers for BLAST architectures. Specifically, we show that the embodiment of turbo principles and the BLAST architecture provides a practical solution to the requirement of high data-rate transmission in a reliable manner for future wireless communication systems.</p>