Asymptotically Optimal Open-Loop Space-Time Architecture Adaptive to Scattering Conditions

Recent results have demonstrated the enormous capacity potential of wireless communication schemes employing multiple transmit and receive antennas, in particular when the transfer functions between the various transmit and receive antenna pairs are independent. In practice, however, those functions tend to be correlated, often because the underlying propagation environment is in fact Ricean. In this contribution, we introduce a new multi-transmit multi-receive architecture that is capable of adjusting the spatial characteristics of its radiated signals to exploit the structure of such a channel. Int he limiting case of a purely specular channel, the new architecture simply defaults to beam steering. On the other hand, in the limiting case of a rich-scattering channel, it reverts to a layered space-time structure radiating multiple parallel streams of data.