A novel quaternion design construction for STBC

In this paper, several investigations have been performed for solving the open problem that if small quaternion orthogonal design can be used to build larger one. The so called coordinate interleaved orthogonal designs(CIODs) are generalized into quaternion in the paper, and consequently it introduces a new construction technique for 4n x 4m rectangular matrices whose elements are quaternion variables based on any existing n x m quaternion orthogonal design for Space-Time Block Codes( STBCs). Analysis shows that maximum likelihood(ML) decoding can be applied for this design with reduced complexity, and the design reaches full diversity. As examples, 8 x 8 quaternion designs are constructed.