Signal design and receiver dimensioning for space-time Viterbi equalisation

Space-time Viterbi equalisation for wireless communication has received muc h interest recently. The authors consider the associated signal and receive r design for improved transmission performance at high baud rates. Three te chniques are proposed; two concern signal design and one concerns receiver design. First, special kinds of sequences called the min-norm training sequ ences are used for channel estimation. These sequences can minimise the mea n-square estimation error in uncorrelated AWGN environments. Secondly, the authors consider using unequal power levels for the training signal and the data signal, with a higher power level for the former. They derive a mathe matical expression for the optimal power ratio. Thirdly, a channel estimati on method using reduced channel length is proposed. This method can reduce the channel estimation error in low SNR environments. Small-scale Monte Car lo simulations are conducted to investigate the performance gain of these t echniques in wireless transmission. The results show varying degrees of adv antage under different conditions.