Diversity eigenbeamforming for coded signals

Transmit antenna diversity without feedback has been widely investigated for various wireless communication systems. Especially, space-time codes are extensively studied to exploit the spatial diversity induced by multiple transmit antennas. Apart from these approaches, there can be different methods that provide a diversity gain using multiple antennas with conventional channel coding. In this paper, diversity eigenbeamforming is studied to exploit the spatial diversity when the channel covariance matrix is available at the transmitter.Diversity eigenbeamforming is based on eigenmode (of the spatial covariance matrix) switching that converts the spatial diversity into the temporal diversity which is exploited by channel coding. Optimized diversity eigenbeamforming is considered to take into account the spatial correlation. In addition, the trade-off between diversity and multiplexing gains is addressed. It is shown that the diversity eigenbeamforming can achieve optimal trade-off for the case of one receive antenna. Although, for simplicity, binary phase shift keying (BPSK) is used to derive diversity eigenbeamforming, any higher-order modulation scheme can also be used with diversity eigenbeamforming. © 2008 IEEE.