Quasi-orthogonal STBC with iterative decoding in bit interleaved coded modulation

In this paper, we present a method to improve the performance of the four transmit antenna quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (STBC) in the coded system. For the four transmit antenna case, the quasi-orthogonal STBC consists of two symbol groups which are orthogonal to each other, but intra group symbols are not. In an uncoded system with matched filter detection, constellation rotation can improve the performance. However, in coded systems, its gain is absorbed by the coding gain, especially for lower rate codes. We propose an iterative decoding method to improve the performance of quasi-orthogonal codes in coded systems. With conventional quasi-orthogonal STBC detection, the joint ML detection can be improved by iterative processing between the demapper and the decoder. Simulation results shows that the performance improvement is about 2 dB at 1% frame error rate.