Concatenated space-time block coding with trellis coded modulation in fading channels

Trellis coded modulation (TCM) is a bandwidth efficient transmission scheme that can achieve high coding gain by integrating coding and modulation. This paper presents an analytical expression for the error event probability of concatenated space-time block coding with TCM which reveals some dominant factors affecting the system performance over slow fading channels when perfect interleavers are used. This leads to establishing the design criteria for constructing the optimal trellis codes of such a concatenated system over slow flat fading channels. Through simulation, significant performance improvement is shown to be obtained by concatenating the interleaved streams of these codes with space-time block codes over fading channels. Simulation results also demonstrate that these trellis codes have better error performance than traditional codes designed for single-antenna Gaussian or fading channels. Performance results over quasi-static fading channels without interleaving are also compared in this paper. Furthermore, it is shown that concatenated space-time block coding with TCM (with/without interleaving) outperforms space-time trellis codes under the same spectral efficiency, trellis complexity, and signal constellation.