Evaluation of soft detection of STBC schemes for turbo codes

In this paper, we present an efficient turbo-coded space time block coding (STBC) schemes in block fading channels. It has been reported that proper utilization of soft decision information is one of the important factors affecting the performance of turbo codes. If a STBC scheme is used with turbo codes, the output of the STBC decoder must be fed into a turbo code decoder in the form of soft decision information. In addition, the performance of a turbo code is subject to how much diverse channel information a decoder can utilize in a codeword. In this paper we evaluate the performance of turbocoded STBC schemes over block fading channels, and present an efficient STBC scheme with very simple maximum likelihood detection capability.