US Patent 8665987 Space-time/space-frequency coding for multi-site and multi-beam transmission

The present invention relates to space-time or space-frequency coding in cellular systems. The same data is transmitted from different antennas with different coverage areas, corresponding to different cells. The different data streams have different parts of the space-time block codes applied. A mobile terminal can combine the different parts of the space-time block codes in different received signals. This provides better performance than the known techniques for single frequency networks. The invention can also be applied to antennas with different coverage areas from the same site, and different beams formed with antenna arrays.