On the decoding of single delay STTC using filter bank based multicarrier modulation

Filter bank based multi-carrier (FBMC) is a multi-carrier modulation scheme that can be considered as an alternative to conventional OFDM with cyclic prefix (CP-OFDM) for transmission over multi-path fading channels. Compared to CP-OFDM, FBMC can provide a higher information bit rate, since it operates without the addition of a CP. Furthermore, FBMC enables the use of different pulse shapes therefore; it can provide better frequency localization than CP-OFDM. Since FBMC is based on real orthogonality, the association with MIMO techniques needs specific decoding schemes. In this paper we consider the combination of FBMC with a single delay space time trellis code (STTC). We propose an iterative decoding based on interference estimation and cancellation which does not require any channel coding or decoding block. We show that if we omit the CP loss of CP-OFDM and by using this FBMC decoding scheme we outperform CP-OFDM in single delay STTC context, this with only a slight increase in complexity.