Signal Detection for the STFC-OFDM System over Time Selective

Fading Channels
Jin-Tao Wang, Member, IEEE, Yu Zhang, Jun Wang, Jian Song, and Zhi-Xing Yang

Abstract The key assumption in all space-time block
coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
schemes is that the channel remains static within the whole
codeword length. This will inevitably introduce an irreducible
error floor, caused by the inter-transmit-antenna interference
(ITAI), in the high signal-to-noise (SNR) region over the time
selective fading channels. To mitigate the impact of ITAI, a
novel signal detection scheme for four-transmit-antenna
space-time-frequency coded OFDM system has been proposed
in this paper. Through the theoretical analysis and computer
simulations, it is proven that the proposed method can handle
both slow and fast fading channels very effectively as well as
efficiently, removing the error floor within the normal
Doppler frequency range
1
.

Index Terms Space-time block codes, orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM), transmit diversity, time selective
fading, inter-transmit-antenna interference (ITAI).
I. INTRODUCTION
Space-Time block coding scheme has been regarded as the
most effective approach of using the transmit diversity to
combat the detrimental effects in the wireless fading channels
and the implementation is relatively simple and cost-effective.
Orthogonal designed space-time block codes (STBCs)
proposed by Alamouti [1] and generalized by Tarokh,
Jafarkhani, and Calderbank [2][3] can achieve full transmit
diversity. Using the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding
algorithm, the transmitted symbols can be decoded separately,
instead of jointly, which greatly facilitates the receiver design.
Since the systems using orthogonal codes cant achieve the
full transmission rate with transmit antennas of more than two,
the STBCs from quasi-orthogonal (QO) designs with full rate
but partial transmit diversity were proposed [4]-[6]. With the
quasi-orthogonal structure, the receiver has to perform the ML
decoding by searching for the pair of symbols, which
introduces certain computational complexity. Recently, the
full diversity quasi-orthogonal designs have been proposed
through the constellation rotation [7][8], and this potentially
achieves the goal of full transmit diversity as well as full rate.
From literatures in this research area, it is easily to figure

1
This research was supported by Multistandard integrated network
convergence for global mobile and broadcast technologies (MING-T, FP6
STREP Contract Nr.045461).
Jin-Tao Wang, Jun Wang, and Zhi-Xing Yang are with the Department of
Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China (e-mail:
wjt01@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn).
Yu Zhang and Jian Song are with the Research Institute of Information
Technology (RIIT), Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China (e-mail:
zhang-yu@tsinghua.edu.cn).
out that the typical ML decoders in the most existing STBC
schemes rely on the so-called quasi-static channel
assumption which is very critical. It says: if an
T
n -transmit-
antenna STBC scheme with code matrix
T
p n is adopted, the
channel remains static over the entire length of codeword, i.e.
s
pT , where
s
T is the symbol period and p is called decoding
delay. Such assumption is valid in some cases but it may not
hold anymore in mobile wireless channels. In this type of
applications, the time-varying, multi-path (i.e., double
selective) fading must be considered and the quasi-static
channel assumption becomes invalid. Time selective fading
will destroy the orthogonality or quasi-orthogonality property
of the channel matrix and therefore, causes the so-called inter-
transmit-antenna interference (ITAI). For example, with the
four-antenna quasi-orthogonal schemes [4]-[6], the time-
variation in the channel results in ITAI among all the symbols,
so the pair-wise ML decoding method will be suboptimal. Due
to the impact of ITAI, an irreducible error floor in the bit-
error-rate (BER) curves will appear in the high signal-to-noise
(SNR) region. Many schemes have been developed to mitigate
the ITAI mentioned above [9]-[12].
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is one
of the most competitive schemes for the digital broadband
communication systems in the multi-path fading environments.
It can effectively avoid the negative impact of the inter-
symbol- interference (ISI) caused by the multi-path
propagation. Multiple antenna technology can be employed in
the OFDM systems to achieve the spatial diversity or increase
the spectral efficiency [13]. Since OFDM offers the possibility
of coding in both time and frequency dimensions, two
methods, space-time coded OFDM (STC-OFDM) and space-
frequency coded OFDM (SFC-OFDM), have therefore been
introduced [14][15]. To improve the performance of OFDM
system with four antennas in the double-selective channels,
the space-time- frequency coded OFDM (STFC-OFDM)
scheme has been proposed [16]. This scheme performs block
coding in both time and frequency dimensions simultaneously
assuming that the channel responses between adjacent OFDM
frames and sub-carriers are approximately the same. So the
channel assumption of STFC-OFDM is much more relaxed
than that of either STC-OFDM or SFC-OFDM system
[14][15]. However, if the channel condition changes very fast
(from frame to frame), the STFC-OFDM scheme still suffers
from ITAI, even though less significantly than that from STC-
OFDM.

Contributed Paper
Manuscript received November 19, 2007 0098 3063/08/$20.00 2008 IEEE
J.-T. Wang et al.: Signal Detection for the STFC-OFDM System over Time Selective Fading Channels 283


Fig. 1. The diagram of the transmitter end in the four-antenna STFC-OFDM scheme.


With this practical concern, a simple zero-forcing (ZF)
method to cancel ITAI based on the STFC-OFDM code
structure is proposed in this paper and its performance is
further evaluated through both theoretical analysis and
computer simulations.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes the channel model with the time selective fading.
After briefly reviewing the STFC-OFDM design in section III,
a simple ITAI cancellation scheme for STFC-OFDM system is
introduced in section IV. Section V gives the simulation
results. We then conclude this paper in section VI.
Note: in the following, a complex conjugation,
transposition and Hermitian operator are denoted as the
superscript
*
,
T
,
H
, respectively.
II. CHANNEL MODEL WITH TIME SELECTIVE FADING
Generally, a wireless frequency selective fading channel
can be modeled as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter with L
taps. The received signal can be written as
1
0
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
L
i i
i
r t h x t w t

=
= +

(1)
where
i
is the delay time and ( )
i
h is the complex fading
coefficient for the i-th tap, ( ) x t is the time domain transmitted
signal, and ( ) w t is the zero-mean, complex additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN). The fading coefficient of each tap is
independently modeled as a zero-mean, complex Gaussian
random variable. Let the power of each path be normalized by
the power of the first path, i.e.
0
( ) h having the unit variance.
The power value of the rest paths is denoted as P
i
with i>0.
Since the channel is time-varying, the relationship of the
channel coefficient ( ) h t at time
s
t nT = and ( )
s
t n m T = + ,
where
s
T is symbol period, are definitely different yet can be
described via a first-order auto-regressive (AR) model
referring to [9],
( ) ( ) ( )
m
h n m h n n m + = + + (2)
where
*
0
E ( ) ( ) J (2 )
m d s
h n h n m mf T = + =

. [ ] E is the
expectation operator, ( )
0
J is the zero-th order Bessel
function of the first kind, and
d
f is the Doppler frequency.
( ) n is another independent complex Gaussian random
variable with zero mean and variance of
2
2
2
1 0
(1 ) 0
m
i m
i
P i

(3)
It has been proved in [17] that the first-order AR model
provides a sufficiently accurate model for the time selective
fading channels and we therefore, will adopt the AR model for
analysis and simulations in the following.
III. REVIEW OF STFC-OFDM SCHEME
To improve the performance of OFDM system with
multiple transmit antennas in the double-selective fading
channels, a space-time-frequency coded OFDM (STFC-
OFDM) scheme has been proposed [16]. In the following, we
give a brief review on this scheme considering the multi-
antenna OFDM system with four transmit antennas, one
receive antenna and N sub-carriers. The diagram of four-
antenna STFC-OFDM is shown in Fig. 1.
Assume ( , ) X k l is the frequency domain input symbol
sequence, where k is the sub-carrier number with
0 1 k N , and l is the OFDM frame number. ( , )
e
X m l
and ( , )
o
X m l are the half length vectors denoting the even and
odd component vectors of ( , ) X k l with 0 / 2 1 m N . The
STFC-OFDM scheme performs block coding in both time and
frequency dimensions simultaneously and from the analysis in
[16], the equivalent transmitted codeword is given by
* *
* *
* *
* *
(2 , ) (2 1, ) (2 , 1) (2 1, 1)
(2 1, ) (2 , ) (2 1, 1) (2 , 1)
(2 , 1) (2 1, 1) (2 , ) (2 1, )
(2 1, 1) (2 , 1) (2 1, ) (2 , )
X ml X m l X ml X m l
X m l X ml X m l X ml
X ml X m l X ml X m l
X m l X ml X m l X ml
+ + + +

+ + + +

=

+ + + +

+ + + +

S

(0 / 2 1) m N (4)
Each column of S denotes the transmitted signals for
different antennas. It is easy to prove that the STFC-OFDM
scheme satisfies the design criterion of the quasi-orthogonal
space-time block code for OFDM systems with four transmit
antennas [16].
284 IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 54, No. 2, MAY 2008

1, 2, 3, 4,
* * * * *
2, 1, 4, 3,
* * * *
*
3, 1 4, 1 1, 1 2, 1
1
4, 1 3, 1
1
(2 )
(2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
(2 1) (2 1) (2 1) (2 1) (2 1)
(2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
(2 )
(2 1) (2 1)
(2 1)
l
l l l l
l l l l l
l l l l
l
l l
l
R m
H m H m H m H m
H m H m H m H m R m
H m H m H m H m
R m
H m H m H
R m
+ + + +
+
+ +
+


+ + + + +

=



+ +
+

* *
* *
1
2, 1 1, 1
1
(2 ) (2 , )
(2 1) (2 1, )
(2 ) (2 , 1)
(2 1) (2 1)
(2 1, 1) (2 1)
l
l
l
l l
l
W m X m l
W m X m l
W m X m l
m H m
X m l W m
+
+ +
+


+ +

+

+

+ +
+ + +


(0 / 2 1) m N (6)

1 1 2
* * * *
1 2 1
*
*
1 2 2 *
*
2 1 2
(2 , )
(2 (2 , )
( ) 0 ( ) ( )
0 ( ) ( ) ( ) (2 1, ) (2 1, )
( ) ( ) ( ) 0
(2 , 1)
(2 , 1)
( ) ( ) 0 ( )
(2 1, 1)
(2 1, 1)
l
X m l
X m l
g m a m a m
g m a m a m X m l X m l
a m a m g m
X m l
X m l
a m a m g m
X m l
X m l

+ +



= +



+

+


+ +


+ +

*
*
1
1
)
(2 1)
(2 )
(2 1)
l
l
l
m
m
m
m

+
+


+



+

(0 / 2 1) m N (10)
where,
2 2 2 2
1 1, 2, 3, 1 4, 1
( ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
l l l l
g m H m H m H m H m
+ +
= + + + ,
2 2 2 2
2 3, 4, 1, 1 2, 1
( ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
l l l l
g m H m H m H m H m
+ +
= + + + ,

* * * *
1 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 1 3, 1 2, 1 4, 1
( ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
l l l l l l l l
a m H m H m H m H m H m H m H m H m
+ + + +
= + ,

* * * *
2 1, 4, 2, 3, 3, 1 2, 1 4, 1 1, 1
( ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
l l l l l l l l
a m H m H m H m H m H m H m H m H m
+ + + +
= + .


Let
i,l
H denote the frequency-domain complex channel
gains from the transmitter Txi (i=1,2,3,4) to the receiver and
l
W denote the i.i.d., zero-mean complex AWGN with the
variance of
2
W
at the l-th time slot. Then the received signal
can be expressed as (6) shown on top of this page. Let H(m)
denote the channel response matrix, i.e.
1, 2, 3, 4,
* * * *
2, 1, 4, 3,
* * * *
3, 1 4, 1 1, 1 2, 1
4, 1 3, 1 2, 1 1, 1
(2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
(2 1) (2 1) (2 1) (2 1)
(2 ) (2 ) (2 ) (2 )
(2 1) (2 1) (2 1) (2 1)
l l l l
l l l l
l l l l
l l l l
H m H m H m H m
H m H m H m H m
H m H m H m H m
H m H m H m H m
+ + + +
+ + + +


+ + + +

=


+ + + +


H(m)
(0 / 2 1) m N (7)
In the so-called quasi-static channel, we assume that the
channel responses between both two adjacent frames and two
consecutive sub-carriers are approximately the same, i.e.
, , , 1 , 1
( ) (2 ) (2 1) (2 ) (2 1)
i i l i l i l i l
H m H m H m H m H m
+ +
= + +
( 1, 2, 3, 4 0 / 2 1) i m N = (8)
Then left multiply
H
H (m) to the both sides of (6) and we get
'
'* * *
' * *
*
1
'
1
(2 , )
(2 ) (2 , )
( ) 0 0 ( )
(2 1) (2 1, ) 0 ( ) ( ) 0 (2 1, )
0 ( ) ( ) 0
(2 ) (2 , 1)
(2 , 1)
( ) 0 0 ( )
(2 1, 1)
(2 1, 1)
l
l
l
l
X ml
W m X ml
a m b m
W m X m l a m b m X m l
b m a m
W m X ml
X ml
b m a m
X m l
W
X m l

+







+ + +



= +



+

+


+ +


+ +

(2 1) m






+


(0 / 2 1) m N (9)
with
'
( )
l
W k still complex AWGN,
4
2
1
( ) ( )
i
i
a m H m
=
=

, and
* *
1 4 2 3
( ) 2Re( ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )) b m H m H m H m H m = . It can be seen
that at the receiver, the symbol pairs of
( (2 , ), (2 1, 1)) X m l X m l + + and ( (2 1, ), (2 , 1)) X m l X m l + + can
be decoded separately.
IV. THE SIMPLE ITAI CANCELLATION SCHEME FOR THE
STFC-OFDM SYSTEM
With the conventional STC-OFDM or SFC-OFDM systems
purely encoded in either time or frequency dimension [14][15],
the channel responses within four consecutive OFDM frame
duration or four consecutive sub-carriers are supposed to be
approximately the same. This assumption usually doesnt hold
in the double selective fading channel and the system
performance therefore, degrades significantly. From (8), in the
STFC-OFDM system, the channel responses are assumed to be
roughly the same only between two adjacent frames and two
consecutive sub-carriers. This greatly relaxes the restrictions on
the channel assumptions and that is why STFC-OFDM scheme
can effectively improve the transmission performance in the
double selective fading channels. However in some cases, the
channel could change very fast (i.e., from frame to frame, hence
not constant over two frames), and the STFC-OFDM scheme
will also suffer performance loss (though not as severely as that
of STC-OFDM system) from ITAI. Therefore, a simple ITAI
cancellation method is proposed in this section.
A. ITAI Cancellation Scheme
Because of the time-variation in the channel, (8) is not valid
any longer. But we can still use the assumption that the
channel responses between two adjacent sub-carriers are
approximately the same, i.e.
, ,
(2 ) (2 1)
i l i l
H m H m + . In practice,
even in the time-varying channels, this is a very sound
assumption in most OFDM applications. So under this
scenario, by left multiplying
H
H (m) to both sides of (6) and
we can get (10), shown on top of this page, with ( )
l
k as the
complex noise. Obviously, the result of
H
H (m)H(m) doesnt
have the quasi-orthogonal structure as shown in (9) and
1
( ) a m
represents the interference
J.-T. Wang et al.: Signal Detection for the STFC-OFDM System over Time Selective Fading Channels 285


Fig. 2. The diagram of the proposed ITAI cancellation scheme.

caused by the channel time-variation.
From (10), the pair-wise ML detection strategy introduced
in section III cant be applied directly here, even the perfect
channel state information (CSI, i.e.,
i,l
H ) has been obtained.
The main reason is that the likelihood function used for
detection can no longer be divided into the sum of two
independent, pair-wise functions. So if the pair-wise ML
detection described in section III is still utilized, an irreducible
error floor in BER curves in the high SNR region will appear.
To mitigate the ITAI by taking the advantage of the perfect
CSI estimation, a three-step ZF scheme has been developed in
this paper with the diagram shown in Fig. 2.

Step 1: From the above analysis, let
H
H (m) left multiply
the received signal to get (10). For simplicity purpose, we
denote
1
1
( ) 0
0 ( )
g m
g m

=


1
G (m)
2
2
( ) 0
0 ( )
g m
g m

=


2
G (m)
1 2
* *
2 1
( ) ( )
( ) ( )
a m a m
a m a m

=

A(m)
Then we get

= =


1 H
H
2
G (m) A(m)
(m) H (m)H(m)
A (m) G (m)
(11)
Step 2: Construct the following matrix Z(m) as

=


2
H
1
G (m) -A(m)
Z(m)
-A (m) G (m)
(12)
It is easy to prove that
( ) g m = = =
H
4
D(m) Z(m) (m) Z(m) H (m)H(m) I (13)
where
2 2
1 2 1 2
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ( ) ( ) ) g m g m g m a m a m = + , and
4
I is
the 4 4 identify matrix. So the decision equation is given by

* * *
* *
*
1
1
'(2 , )
'(2 ) (2 , )
' (2 1) ' (2 1, ) (2 1, )
' (2 ) (2 , 1)
' (2 , 1)
(2 1, 1) '(2 1)
'(2 1, 1)
l
l
l
l
X m l
m X m l
m X m l X m l
m X m l
X m l
X m l m
X m l

+
+





+ + +


= +


+

+

+ + +


+ +

D(m)
(0 / 2 1) m N (14)

With the coefficient matrix being diagonalized as shown in
(14), the ITAI has been totally canceled.
Step 3: Let Y(m) denote the estimation vector, i.e.
* *
'(2 , ) ' (2 1, ) ' (2 , 1) '(2 1, 1)
T
X m l X m l X m l X m l



= + + + +


Y(m)
.
From (14), it is observed that a simple least square (LS)
symbol-wise detection method can be adopted:
[ ]
{ }
2
arg min ( )
j
j
i
c C
g m c

Y(m) (15)
where 1, 2, 3, 4 i = , C is the transmitted symbol set, and
[ ]
i
Y(m) is the i-th element in the vector Y(m) for detection.
B. Algorithm Discussion
1) Optimality: We consider the statistics of the complex
noise '( )
l
k in (14). Let W(m) , (m) and '(m) denote the
nose vectors in (6), (10) and (14). We have
2
E
W
=

H
4
W(m)W (m) I (16)

2
E E
W
= =

H H H H
(m) (m) H (m)W(m)W (m)H(m) H (m)H(m) (17)

2
2
2
E E
( )
( )
W
W
W
g m
g m

=

=
=
=
H H H
H H
H
'(m)' (m) Z(m)(m) (m)Z (m)
Z(m)H (m)H(m)Z (m)
Z (m)
Z(m)
(18)
In general, Z(m) is neither diagonal as it should be in the
orthogonal designs nor quasi-diagonal as it should be in the
quasi-orthogonal schemes. Therefore, (15), by nature, is a
suboptimum approach instead of an ML detector.
If the channel is time-invariant over two consecutive
OFDM frame periods, i.e. in the quasi-static channel,
1
( ) a m
is zero and E

H
'(m)' (m) will have the quasi-orthogonal
structure from (12) and (18). So in this special case, the
optimum pair-wise ML detector can be performed as
introduced in section III. If we still use the suboptimal
decoder shown in (15), certain performance loss will be
introduced. From the following simulation results, it can be
seen, however, that the performance loss introduced by this
scheme is still affordable.
2) Complexity: From (10)-(14), under the perfect CSI
estimation, only two 4 4 complex matrix multiplications are
required and there is no matrix inversion in the proposed
three-step ZF scheme. Comparing with the existing methods
applied for the quasi-orthogonal design [12], this scheme
greatly reduces the computational complexity.
Moreover, (15) is a linear processing detector. So the
complexity of the detection for the M-ary constellation is
( ) O M per symbol, while it is
2
( ) O M per symbol in the pair-
wise detector in the conventional quasi-orthogonal designs
[16]. As the proposed scheme also inherits the virtue of the
simple implementation of the STFC-OFDM at the transmitter
end, the computational load of this scheme should therefore
not be a problem.
286 IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 54, No. 2, MAY 2008

3) Flexibility: As mentioned earlier, if the channel is almost
time-invariant over two consecutive OFDM frame periods in
practice, we only need to perform Step 1 and adopt the pair-
wise detector as described in section III, avoiding the
performance loss. To save the power consumption, two
synchronous switches, K
1
and K
2
, could be used as shown in
Fig. 3. Whether using the conventional pair-wise detector or
the proposed linear detector (i.e. single-symbol detector) is
simply determined by the comparison result between the
channel responses of the two adjacent OFDM frames (the
detailed strategy in determining when to switch from our
proposed ITAI cancellation scheme to ML decoder is a part of
future work). The structure presented in Fig.3 provides a very
flexible solution for the various wireless fading environments.
Finally, by setting zero for the channel gains from
transmitter Tx4 to the receiver in (6) and all the other related
equations, the introduced scheme can essentially be used in
the three- transmit-antenna system without any other
modifications.

Fig. 3. The diagram of the combined scheme switching between the
conventional pair-wise symbol detector and single-symbol detector.

V. SIMULATIONS
The BER performance of the proposed signal detection
scheme based on the four-transmit-antenna STFC-OFDM
system was evaluated by computer simulations. We used the
Time Domain Synchronous - OFDM (TDS-OFDM) system as
an example to demonstrate its effectiveness. TDS-OFDM
system is proposed by Tsinghua University as the key
technique for the Chinese digital television terrestrial
broadcasting (DTTB) standard [18]. It utilizes the
pseudorandom noise (PN) sequences as the guard interval (GI)
as well as the training symbols for the channel estimation and
timing recovery. More detailed work on TDS-OFDM system
can be referred to [19]-[21] and the literatures therein.
The channel model for simulations is from the Brazil digital
television test report [22] with the parameters listed in Table I.
This is a typical frequency selective fading channel model in
DTTB. The parameters of the TDS-OFDM system used for
the simulations are listed in Table II.
In our simulations, it was assumed that the transmit power
of all the transmitters were equal, the fading paths from each
transmitter to the receiver were independent, and the CSI of
each transmit branch was perfectly estimated.



TABLE I
TYPICAL DTTB CHANNEL MODEL
Multi-path
propagation
Relative
Amplitude (dB)
Delay Time
( s )
1 0 0.00
2 -12 0.30
3 -4 3.50
4 -7 4.40
5 -15 9.50
6 -22 12.70

TABLE II
THE PARAMETERS OF TDS-OFDM SYSTEM
Symbol Rate 7.56 MSPS
Number of Sub-carriers 3780
Frame Body Period (T
s
)
500 s
Sub-carrier Interval 2 kHz
Guard Interval 1/9
Sub-carrier modulation QPSK or 16QAM
FEC none


Fig. 4. The relation between and
d s
f T .

It is usually true that the interference
1
( ) a m in (10) caused
by the channel time-variation is much smaller than the
absolute value of the terms in the two diagonals of (m) , i.e.
2
( ) a m ,
1
( ) g m and
2
( ) g m . Let
I
(m) denote the matrix
including the nondiagonal terms of (m) . Then we define
interference beyond QO-STBC structure as
F
F
=E




I
(m)
(m)

where
F
represents the Frobenius norm of . Clearly,
is dependent on the Doppler frequency
d
f of the channel. Fig.
4 shows the relation between and the normalized Doppler
frequency
d s
f T . It is observed that for the normal range of
d
f ,
1 .
Simulation results for the system with QPSK and 16QAM
modulation on each sub-carrier are shown in Fig.5 and Fig.6,
respectively. We compare the BER performance between the
J.-T. Wang et al.: Signal Detection for the STFC-OFDM System over Time Selective Fading Channels 287

STFC-OFDM system in [16] and our proposed ITAI
cancellation scheme (STFC-OFDM-ZF) under the different
Doppler frequencies of
d
f =0Hz, 50Hz, 100Hz, 150Hz and
200Hz. Correspondingly, the normalized Doppler frequencies
are
d s
f T =0, 0.025, 0.05, 0.075 and 0.1. The maximal Doppler
frequency
d
f of 200 Hz corresponds to the receiver velocity
of about 260 to 500 km/h in the TV UHF band
(@470~862MHz). So the simulations here are sufficient to
show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme under the
different time-variant scenarios.

Fig. 5. The BER performance comparison with QPSK modulation on
each sub-carrier of the TDS-OFDM system.


Fig. 6. The BER performance comparison with 16QAM modulation on
each sub-carrier of the TDS-OFDM system.

Form the simulation results, it can be seen that the proposed
STFC-OFDM-ZF scheme is quite effective in suppressing the
negative impact of the channel time selectivity. When the
channel is quasi-static, i.e.
d
f =0Hz, from the slopes of the
BER curves in the figures, we found that the two schemes
have the same diversity order. As the detection scheme shown
in (15) is not optimal in this case, the performance of the new
scheme is around 1-dB worse than that of the conventional
pair-wise detection. When the channel becomes much more
time selective, the performance of the conventional scheme
degrades severely, suffering from an irreducible error floor in
the high SNR cases. In contrast, there is no error floor with
the adaptation of our proposed scheme and the BER
performance degradation is less than 2-dB, even in the highest
Doppler frequency case.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
To deal with the irreducible error floor problem caused by
ITAI, from which the conventional pair-wise detectors
normally suffer in the high SNR region under the time-
varying channel condition, a novel signal detection method for
the STFC-OFDM system over the time selective fading
channels has been proposed in this paper. A simple yet very
flexible switch-based structure associated with our proposed
scheme is also presented which could potentially save the
power consumption as well as avoiding the performance loss
under the negligible Doppler frequency shift case. Both
theoretical analysis and computer simulation confirm that the
proposed scheme can handle both slow and fast fading
channels extremely well, removing error floor in the normal
Doppler frequency range. Moreover, under the perfect CSI
estimation, the computational complexity of our scheme is
very small. Considering that the four-transmit-antenna STBC
system is much more vulnerable to the time selective fading
than the two-transmit-antenna case, the proposed signal
detection method will provide a useful option for the future
applications when higher transmit diversity is indispensable.
It is also interesting to point out that, for the four-antenna
quasi-orthogonal STBCs with the symbols from the same
signal constellation set, the diversity order is two while the
code rate is one [4]-[6]. Recently, the full diversity quasi-
orthogonal designs have been proposed through the
constellation rotation [7][8]. STFC-OFDM system can be
easily extended to the constellation rotated quasi-orthogonal
designs by simply introducing a phase-shift module before the
space-time encoder shown in Fig. 1, achieving the full
diversity and full rate simultaneously. In this regard, the novel
ITAI cancellation method can also be effectively adopted in
the constellation rotated design.
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Jin-Tao Wang (S03-M06) received his B.Eng and
Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering both from
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2001 and 2006,
respectively. He became a Student Member (S) of IEEE
in 2003, and a Member (M) in 2006. Since 2006, he has
been an assistant professor of Tsinghua's DTV
Technology R&D center. He is the standard committee
member for the Chinese national digital terrestrial television broadcasting
standard. His current research interest is in the area of the broadband wireless
transmission, especially the channel estimation and space-time coding
techniques.





Yu Zhang received the B.E. and M.S. degrees, both in
Electronic Engineering, from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively, and the
Ph.D degree in electrical and computer engineering from
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, in 2006. From
March 2007 to November 2007, he was an Assistant
Professor with the Research Institute of Information
Technology, Tsinghua University. He is currently an Assistant Professor with
the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University. His current
research interests include the performance analysis and detection schemes for
MIMO-OFDM systems over doubly-selective fading channels, transmitter and
receiver diversity techniques, and channel estimation and equalization
algorithms.


Jun Wang received the B. Eng. and Ph.D degree from
the Department of Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2003
respectively. He is an assistant professor and member of
Digital TV R&D center of Tsinghua University since
2000. His main research interests focus on broadband
wireless transmission techniques, especially
synchronization and channel estimation. He is actively involved in the
Chinese national standard on the Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting
technical activities, and is selected by the Standardization Administration of
China as the Standard committee member for drafting.


Jian Song received his B.Eng and Ph.D degrees in
Electrical Engineering both from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China in 1990 and 1995, respectively and
worked for the same university upon his graduation. He
has worked at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and
University of Waterloo, Canada in 1996 and 1997,
respectively. He has been with Hughes Network Systems
in USA for 7 years before joining the faculty team in Tsinghua in 2005 as a
professor. He is now the director of Tsinghuas DTV Technology R&D
center. His primary research interest is in physical layer and has been working
in quite different areas of fiber-optic, satellite and wireless communications,
as well as the powerline communications. His current research interest is in
the area of digital TV broadcasting.


Zhi-Xing Yang is a full professor at the Department of
Electronics Engineering of Tsinghua University, China.
He is the executed director of the State Key Laboratory
on Microwave & Digital Communications, China, and the
executed director of the development group of the digital
television terrestrial broadcasting state standard for
China. He received several awards and held several
patents. His research interests are in high-speed data transmission over
broadband digital television terrestrial broadcasting, wireless links, wireless
communication theory and communication systems design.







J.-T. Wang et al.: Signal Detection for the STFC-OFDM System over Time Selective Fading Channels 289