Suboptimum receiver interfaces and space-time codes

We compare suboptimum linear and nonlinear interfaces to be used for decoding space-time codes transmitted over a multiple-antenna Rayleigh fading channel with perfect channel-state information available at the receiver. The codes we consider are obtained by apportioning evenly, among the transmit antennas, the symbols of off-the-shelf convolutional codes. We observe how the introduction of an interleaver can be beneficial here. We introduce a new simple iterative linear interface, based on hard Viterbi decoding and offering a performance considerably improved with respect to noniterative receivers.