Asterism decoding for turbo coded MIMO systems

The area of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communications systems has received enormous attention recently as they can provide a roughly linear increase in data rate by using multiple transmit and receive antennas. MIMO combined with an turbo coding has been shown as a promising way to achieve near capacity for wireless channels. Where previously described decoders provide linear decoding where the number of receive antennas is at least equal to the number of transmit antennas, are computationally burdensome when n_t > n_r. Asterism decoding is a scheme that achieved ML performance for MIMO systems for any number of receive antennas. By applying Asterism decoding to turbo coded MIMO systems we show that good performance can be achieved for n_t > n_r without the need of additional feedback into the MIMO decoding stage.