Apparatus and methods for providing efficient space-time structures for preambles, pilots and data for multi-input, multi-output communications systems

1. A computer program embodied in a computer readable medium for providing efficient space-time structures for preambles, pilots and data for multi-input, multi-output communications systems, the computer program comprising:

logic configured to provide an initial structure;

logic configured to verify that rows of said initial structure are linearly independent;

logic configured to apply an orthonormalization procedure to said initial structure to obtain a space-time structure for a preamble or pilot in a time or frequency domain; and

logic configured to insert the space-time structure as a preamble or pilot in the time or frequency domain with one or more data symbols for transmission in the multi-input, multi-output communications system.

2. The computer program of claim 1 , wherein said logic configured to provide an initial structure comprises:

logic configured to choose a symbol alphabet to provide symbols for said initial structure; and

logic configured to choose an initial configuration of said initial structure.

3. The computer program of claim 1 , further comprising:

logic configured to confirm that symbols of said space-time structure are within a predetermined distance of symbols of said initial structure;

logic configured to construct a space-time sequence structure from a plurality of said space-time structures; and

logic configured to verify that a peak-to-average power ratio of said space-time structure is less than a predetermined value.

4. The computer program of claim 3 , wherein said logic configured to confirm chat the symbols of said space-time structure are within a predetermined distance of the symbols of said initial structure comprises logic configured to apply a Euclidean distance metric to determine the distance between the symbols of said space-time structure and the symbols of said initial structure.

5. The computer program of claim 1 , wherein said logic configured to verify that the rows of said initial structure are linearly independent comprises logic configured to determine rank of said initial structure.

6. The computer program of claim 1 , wherein said logic configured to apply an orthonormalization procedure to said initial structure to obtain a space-time structure comprises logic configured to apply a row-wise Gram-Schmidt procedure to said initial structure to obtain a space-time structure.