Performance of combined channel coding and space-time block coding with antenna selection

We analyzed the performance of the serial concatenation of convolutional coding with space-time block coding. We obtained an error bound for the space-time coded system with ideal channel interleaving. Our results indicated that these error bounds are in a good agreement with the exact BER performance especially at low BER levels where error bounds become more significant. We have also shown that the use of antenna selection at the receiver side only effects the SNR coding gain, but not the overall diversity order. This phenomena was evident for both the fast and block flat fading channel models. Moreover, we have shown that the receiver performance is affected significantly by channel interleaving. In that, a comparison between the quasi-static and fast fading channels was conducted where it was shown that the time diversity order dominates the overall system diversity. Furthermore, we have noted that the use of antenna selection results in almost the same SNR reduction regardless of the channel model used.