A concatenation scheme of Polar codes and space-time block codes in multiple-input multiple-output channels

Space-time block code (STBC) based on orthogonal design is one of the space-time coding methods to achieve multi-input multi-output (MIMO) diversity gain. STBC can provide sufficient space diversity gain, but it can not provide coding gain. Polar codes based on channel polarization are the first class of provably capacity-achieving codes with low encoding and decoding complexity. In order to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of STBC, a concatenated scheme with Polar codes and STBC, named Polar-STBC scheme, is proposed in this paper. The BER performance of Polar-STBC system is discussed by numerical simulation under different polar code length, different polar code rates, and different coding methods of STBC. The results show that the performance of Polar-STBC has a big improvement in comparison with that using STBC only. The coding gain of Polar-STBC system is about 5dB when the BER is 10^-3. Meanwhile, the longer code length and the lower code rate Polar codes have, the better BER performance the Polar-STBC system has. In addition, the different STBC coding methods have influence on the Polar-STBC system. The Polar-STBC system with more receiving antennas has a better BER performance in comparison with those with the same sending antennas and less receiving antennas. The coding gain of Polar-STBC system with 2 receiving antenna is 6.5dB improvement to the system with 1 receiving antenna when BER is 10^-3 and the code length is 1024.