Trellis coding for diagonally layered space-time systems

We examine the performance of trellis codes that are designed to have a distance structure that is matched to the periodic signal-to-noise ratio variation of the channel created by G.J. Foschini´s diagonally layered space-time architecture (see Bell Labs Tech. J., vol.1, no.2, p.41-59, 1996), under the assumption that the channel is static during one burst but may change from burst to burst. We show that trellis coding comes within 2 dB of the best theoretical outage curve possible with D-BLAST (diagonal Bell Labs layered space-time).