Assembled space-time turbo trellis codes

A novel full rate space-time turbo trellis code, referred to as an assembled space-time turbo trellis code (ASTTTC), is presented in this paper. For this scheme, input information binary sequences are first encoded using two parallel concatenated convolutional encoders. The encoder outputs are split into four parallel streams and each of them is modulated by a QPSK modulator. The modulated symbols are assembled by a predefined linear function rather than punctured as in the standard schemes. This results in a lower code rate and a higher coding gain over time-varying fading channels. An extended two-dimensional (2-D) log-MAP (maximum a posteriori probability) decoding algorithm, which simultaneously calculates two a posteriori probabilities (APP), is developed to decode the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that, under the same conditions, the proposed code considerably outperforms the conventional space-time turbo codes over time-varying fading channels.