Abstract
In this thesis, we derive a new space-time code design criterion for linear modulation over frequency-nonselective fading channels. In order to achieve maximum transmit spatial diversity, we first adopt a method in the literature to use division algebras to design an inner space-time code length equal to the number of transmit antennas. Then this short inner space-time code in concatenated with a ring systematic convolutional encoder to encode a space-time code of full length to achieve the maximum transmit diversity. For practical channels, we place an interleaver between convolutional encoder and the mini space-time encoder to combat the correlated fading. Both theoretical analytic and simulation results show that our proposed coding scheme is very effective.