Patent ID: 7684509

Claim:
A method for encoding signals for transmission over a plurality of transmit antennas, the method comprising: generating a code word having a construction specifying a space-time overlay having a constraint that provides full spatial diversity over a communication channel having block fading characteristics without altering a signal transmitted from a first one of the transmit antennas, wherein the signal represents the code word, and wherein the constraint includes [c 1 (s) , c 2 (s) , . . . , c n−1 (s) , c n (s) ]=[c 1 (1) , c 2 (1) , . . . , c n−1 (1) , c n 1 ], wherein c t (i) is a code symbol assigned to an i-th one of the transmit antennas at time t, and s is a baseband version of the code word.