Improvement of BPSK space-time turbo code with full antenna diversity

Space-time turbo codes have advantages of both space-time codes and turbo codes. Space-time turbo code proposed by Su and Geraniotis (2001) achieves full coding rate and full antenna diversity. This paper presents some improvements of the space-time turbo code using a two-antenna configuration. We propose an encoder in which a serial connection of an interleaver and a deinterleaver is removed and the constraint of the interleaver is reduced. We also propose a modified binary decoding which estimates more precise extrinsic information. Simulation results show the proposed encoder achieves full antenna diversity in spite of a simple configuration with reduced constraint of the interleaver. Furthermore, our proposed decoding provides a better performance than that of the Su´s space-time turbo code.