Improved Pair-Wise Detections of Differential Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Modulation with Four Transmit Antennas

In this paper, we propose new complex and real pair-wise detection for conventional differential space–time modulations based on quasi-orthogonal design with four transmit antennas for general QAM. Since the new complex and real pair-wise detections allow the independent joint ML detection of two complex and real symbol pairs, respectively, the decoding complexity is the same as or lower than conventional differential detections. Simulation results show that the proposed detections exhibit almost identical performance with an optimum maximum-likelihood receiver, as well as improved performance compared with conventional pair-wise detections, especially for higher modulation order.