A concatenated system of turbo codes and space-time block codes assisted by iterative decoding

Space-time block codes (STBC) are widely used to obtain diversity gain in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel and Turbo codes are used to provide coding gain. So here a turbo-coded STBC concatenated system, which fully exploits the diversity gain and coding gain are studied. Specially we propose an iterative decoding scheme with a soft information processor created in the system to adjust the soft information for higher reliability in the system. It calls on iteration procedure in the whole system. Meanwhile we also investigate a number of Turbo codes schemes applied in the system. Simulation results in the end show that the system performance can be improved compared with conventional direct-connected decoding systems. It depends on numbers of iteration in the concatenated system and types of Turbo codes. Impoved BER performance can be achieved by making a trade-off between types of Turbo codes and numbers of iteration.