Concatenation of space-time block codes and turbo product codes over Rayleigh flat fading channels

Space-time block codes (STBCs) are designed to obtain the maximum possible diversity gain. However, STBCs are not designed to achieve an additional coding gain [(S.M. Alamouti, Oct 1998), (V. Tarokh, July 1999)]. Therefore, STBCs need to be concatenated with an outer code which provides a significant coding gain. Turbo product codes (TPCs) are a kind of high-efficient coding scheme in high code rate, which more approach the Shannon limit than do turbo convolutional code (TCC)[Y. He et al., Nov 2003]. In this paper, we consider the concatenation of TPCs with STBCs to improve the reliability of the wireless communication systems. We combined turbo product code(64, 57, 4) as an outer code. STBCs-TPCs system with multiple-transmit and single-receive antenna (MISO) are investigated for Rayleigh flat fading channels. Simulation results show that for one system with total spectral efficiency of 0.793 bits/s/Hz, bit error rate (BER) is 0 at E_b/N₀ of 7 dB using 4 transmit antennas (4Tx) or at E_b/N₀ of 12 dB using 3Tx or at E_b/N₀ of 21 dB for 2Tx and that for another system with total spectral efficiency of 1.19 bits/s/Hz, BER is 0 at E_b/N₀ of 8 dB using 4Tx or at E_b/N₀ of 15 dB using 3Tx.