Space-Time Block Codes Assisted by Fast Turbo Codes

Space-time coding is widely used in wireless communication systems to provide diversity gain and channel coding is used to increase coding gain. In this paper, we investigate a new method for turbo codes which is dividing turbo encoder and decoder into several parallel coding and decoding blocks. These blocks work simultaneously and yield to much faster coding scheme in comparison with classical turbo codes. We compare simulation results of these new turbo codes with classical turbo codes to demonstrate that their performance is comparable with classical turbo codes, albeit they are much faster. Also, we introduce a new system by concatenating this fast turbo coding as outer code with Alamouti´s G₂ space-time block coding scheme as inner code to achieve the benefits of both techniques including acceptable diversity & coding gain as well as short coding delay. We consider the performance of this new system in the block Rayleigh fading channel.