A complex orthogonal design (COD) used in space-time block codes is a kind of combinatorial design. It has been well studied because it has a fast maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm and achieves full diversity. When designing CODs, there are seven characteristics that should be considered, which include code rate, decoding delay, transceiver signal linearization, peak-to-average power ratio, etc. In this paper, we study the relationships among these design criteria. We prove that the maximum rate of generalized CODs (GCODs) that meet the last five criteria is 1/2. Moreover, we present a new method to construct GCODs based on CODs. Using this method on balanced complex orthogonal designs (BCODs), we obtain a novel class of GCODs that performs almost perfectly with respect to all the seven properties.
['Haibin Kan', 'Xiaodong Liu', 'Guangyue Han']
On the criteria for designing complex orthogonal space-time block codes