LDPC concatenated space-time block coded system in multipath fading environment: Analysis and evaluation

Irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been found to show exceptionally good performance for single antenna systems over a wide class of channels. In this paper, the performance of LDPC codes with multiple antenna systems is investigated in flat Rayleigh and Rician fading channels for different modulation schemes. The focus of attention is mainly on the concatenation of irregular LDPC codes with complex orthogonal space-time codes. Iterative decoding is carried out with a density evolution method that sets a threshold above which the code performs well. For the proposed concatenated system, the simulation results show that the QAM technique achieves a higher coding gain of 8.8 dB and 3.2 dB over the QPSK technique in Rician (LOS) and Rayleigh (NLOS) faded environments respectively.