Concatenated space-time coding

The serial concatenation of standard convolutional codes with differential spacetime modulation is considered for fast flat fading multiple antenna channels. Decoding is performed iteratively by passing symbol-wise a-posteriori probability information between the decoders of the inner space-time code and the outer convolutional code. An input-output extrinsic information transfer analysis is used to predict thresholds for outer codes of various memory orders. Simulation results show that this system can achieve bit error rates below 10−4 at less than 2.5 dB from the Shannon capacity of the multiple antenna channel. Supported in part by NSF Grants CCR 9732962 and ECS 9979323.