Reduced complexity signal detection for OFDM systems with transmit diversity

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with multiple transmit antennas can exploit space-time block coding on each subchannel for reliable data transmission. Spacetime coded OFDM systems, however, are very sensitive to time variant channels because the channels need to be static over multiple OFDM symbol periods. In this paper, we propose to mitigate the channel variations in the frequency domain using a linear filter in the frequency domain that exploits the sparse structure of the system matrix in the frequency domain. Our approach has reduced complexity compared with alternative approaches based on time domain block-linear filters. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed frequency domain block-linear filter reduces computational complexity by more than a factor of ten at the cost of small performance degradation, compared with a time domain block-linear filter.