Turbo coded modulation for wireless communications with antenna diversity

We propose to use turbo codes for wireless communication systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas over Rayleigh fading channels. We show that a simple, arbitrarily picked, turbo coded modulation scheme with a sub-optimal decoding algorithm outperforms the space-time codes significantly. We present examples for both block and fast fading channels, and observe gains as high as 8 dB at a bit error rate of 10^-5 for large interleaver lengths, suitable for data communications. Furthermore, we show that, depending on the channel model, the turbo code block size can be chosen small enough to be suitable for speech applications, and still offer a significant performance improvement in terms of bit and frame error rates