MIMO spatial turbo coding with iterative equalization

This paper proposes a structure that combines iterative equalization and turbo decoding, denoted as spatial turbo coding (STC), for single carrier signaling to achieve near capacity performance in multipath-rich fading channels. Instead of multiplexing the encoded bits in the time domain as in the standard turbo codes, the proposed STC transmits coded bits in the space domain by employing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transceiver to exploit space diversity, path diversity and coding gains through the decoding branches at the receiver. The considered MIMO detector is a MIMO frequency domain soft-cancelation and minimum mean square error equalizer (FD/SC-MMSE). Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart analysis confirms that bit-error-rate (BER) pinch-off is achieved in 64-path Rayleigh fading channels with equal average path gains power which is just by about 1dB away from the static channel capacity/dimension of 2×2 MIMO systems.