Quasiregular LDPC codes for space-time wireless transmission

Irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have shown exceptionally good performance for single antenna systems over a wide class of channels. In this paper, we investigate their application to multiple antenna systems in flat Rayleigh fading channels. For small transmit arrays, we focus mainly on space-time coding with 2^p-ary LDPC codes, where p equals the number of encoded bits transmitted by the transmit antenna array during each signaling interval. For large transmit arrays, we study a layered space-time architecture using binary LDPC codes as component codes of each layer. We show through simulation that, when applied to multiple antenna systems with high diversity order, LDPC codes of quasiregular construction are able to achieve higher coding gain over quasistatic fading channels than previously proposed space-time trellis and convolutional codes.