Patent ID: 7720168

Claim:
A method for conveying an encoded data stream in a wireless communication system, the method comprising the steps of: providing a non-precoded data stream; providing a transmitter having a plurality of transmit antennas, said transmitter including means for simultaneously transmitting via each of said transmit antennas a corresponding symbol over a corresponding one of a plurality of frequencies; providing a receiver having a plurality of receive antennas, said receiver including means for recovering the non-precoded data stream from the symbols transmitted over said plurality of frequencies, where a region of space between each of said plurality of transmit antennas and each of said plurality of receive antennas defines a transmission channel; forming a first diversity-coded codeword from symbols corresponding to data in the data stream, the diversity-coded codeword defining a two-dimensional block codeword across said plurality of transmit antennas in the spatial domain and across a plurality of sub-carriers in the frequency domain; applying a transform to said first diversity-coded codeword to produce a second diversity-coded codeword, said second diversity-coded codeword including a plurality of column vectors equal in number to said number of transmit antennas and including a plurality of rows equal in number to an integer multiple of said plurality of frequencies; transmitting said second diversity-coded codeword such that symbols thereof in of each said column vector are transmitted via a corresponding one of said plurality of transmit antennas and symbols thereof in each said row are transmitted over a corresponding one of said plurality of frequencies; and receiving at said receiver said second diversity-coded codewords via said plurality of receive antennas and said plurality of frequencies and recovering the non-precoded data stream therefrom; wherein said transmitter has no a priori knowledge of transmission characteristics of the transmission channel; wherein the first diversity-coded codeword is formed to achieve a maximum diversity order for a multi-antenna frequency-selective channel.