A unitary space-time modulation scheme with multistage decoding

The complexity of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding for unitary space-time modulation (USTM) is exponential in the code rate times symbol periods. In this letter, we propose a new USTM scheme which consists of USTMs with noncoherent multistage decoding. The decoding of the proposed scheme is less complex than ML decoding. We also find some good codes of the proposed scheme according to the design criterion. Simulation results indicate that our codes perform better than seamless USTMs over the quasistatic fading channels.