To improve performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for fading channels, this paper proposes increasing frequency and time diversity using linear dispersion codes (LDC-OFDM). Methods of LDC-OFDM processing are proposed for both zero-padding (ZP) and cyclic-prefix (CP) type guard intervals. A two-step-estimation (TSE) decoding strategy is proposed that decouples symbol estimation from LDC decoding. This paper analyzes the upper bound diversity order of LDC-CP-OFDM, which is equal to the full diversity order available in the channels. A criterion for full frequency-time diversity design is derived, a rate-one code is provided and performance is examined through simulations. This paper also investigates LDC-CP-OFDM and LDC-ZP-OFDM performance under imperfect channel estimation and low complexity receiver structures, respectively. In addition, TSE is shown to have performance close to that of full complexity one-step estimation (OSE).
['Jinsong Wu', 'Steven D. Blostein']
High-rate diversity across time and frequency using linear dispersion