Space-Time Receiver for Wideband BLAST in Rich-Scattering Wireless Channels

BLAST (Bell Labs Layered Space-Time) is a communication technique for achieving very high spectral efficiencies in rich-scattering environments using multiple transmit antennas, multiple receive antennas, and advanced signal processing at the receiver. The high spectral efficiency is enabled by the fact that a rich-scattering environment makes the signal from every individual transmitter appear highly uncorrelated at each of the receive antennas. As a result, the signal corresponding to every transmitter has a distinct spatial signature. These different spatial signatures allow the receiver to effectively separate, with clever signal processing, the data streams radiated--simultaneously and on the same frequency--by the different transmit antennas. In a sense, the scattering environment acts like a very large reflector that makes it possible for the receiver to resolve the individual transmitters and decode their data.