Space-time turbo trellis coded modulation for wireless data communications

This paper presents the design of space-time turbo trellis coded modulation (ST turbo TCM) for improving the bandwidth efficiency and the reliability of future wireless data networks. We present new recursive space-time trellis coded modulation (STTC) which outperform feedforward STTC proposed by Tarokh et al. (1998) and Baro et al. (2000) on slow and fast fading channels. A substantial improvement in performance can be obtained by constructing ST turbo TCM which consists of concatenated recursive STTC, decoded by iterative decoding algorithm. The proposed recursive STTC are used as constituent codes in this scheme. They have been designed to satisfy the design criteria for STTC on slow and fast fading channels, derived for systems with the product of transmit and receive antennas larger than 3. The proposed ST turbo TCM significantly outperforms the best known STTC on both slow and fast fading channels. The capacity of this scheme on fast fading channels is less than 3 dB away from the theoretical capacity bound for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels.