We consider orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) in vehicular environments, where the channels are nonidentically distributed. It is shown that the nonidentical channel statistics lead to nonidentical channel estimation errors, which consequently affect the performance and even the existing receiver structure of OSTBC. We show that the conventional symbol-by-symbol (SBS) decoder of OSTBC is suboptimum in vehicular environments. A new optimum decoder is derived, which can be simplified to a new SBS decoder under certain conditions. To the best of our knowledge, our work here is the first to consider the optimum decoder for OSTBC in vehicular environments. Performance analysis and simulations are provided, which show that our new decoder substantially outperforms the conventional decoder.
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