Iteratively decoded space-time trellis codes

Space-time trellis codes (STTC) have been proposed as the constituent codes of turbo codes (D Cui et al., 1999) (W Firmanto et al., 2001). In this article, we propose a similar scheme, the iteratively decoded space-time trellis codes (ISTTC), and derive the performance upper bound on BER. When the STTC are combined with space-time block codes (STTC-STBC), it provides an improved BER over the system with STTC only. Here, we also propose the iteratively decoded STTC-STBC (ISTTC-STBC) to improve both the performance and the rate. It can compensate the reduced transmission rate caused from the iteratively decoded STTC to combine the STBC having more transmitters than the constituent STTC. This paper presents the details of computing the extrinsic information shared between two constituent decoders, design schemes of ISTTC with or without STBC, and their performance results shown via simulation.