Patent ID: 7042956

Claim:
A method for transmitting encoded signals over a communication channel of a communication system, the method comprising: receiving a message signal; and generating a code word in response to the message signal, the code word being based upon a stacking construction that is generalized for the communication channel, the communication channel being characterized as a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) block fading channel, wherein the generalized stacking construction specifies C as a linear L t ×n space-time code, the space-time code being of dimension k including code word matrices, c = [ x _ ⁢ M 1 x _ ⁢ M 2 ⋮ x _ ⁢ M L t ] wherein x denotes an arbitrary k-tuple of information bits and n≧L t , M 1 , M 2 , . . . , M L t are binary matrices of dimension k×n, n≦k, and L t represents the number of transmit antennas in the communication system.