Serial concatenation of STBC or dSTBC with convolutional codes or turbo codes for space-time correlated channels

This paper presents the results for the performance of serial concatenation of space-time block code (STBC) or differential STBC (dSTBC) with various channel codes, including convolutional codes (CCs) and turbo codes (TCs). These serially concatenated codes provide diversity gain as well as coding gain. The bandwidth efficiency is 1 bit/s/Hz for all the codes studied. The serial concatenation with TC not only provides coding gain over the serial concatenation with CC, but also mitigates the effects of spatial cross-correlation between fading channels. The serial concatenation of STBC and 1/2 rate TC with quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation is 3.7 dB from the channel capacity at the BER of 10^-5 in a 2 transmit and 2 receive antennae system, where a modified Jakes´ time-correlated flat fading model is used. The cost for the absence of channel state information (CSI) is approximately 3 to 4 dB while dSTBC is used.