SVD iterative detection of turbo-coded multiantenna unitary differential modulation

A new suboptimal demodulator based on a singular value decomposition for estimation of unitary matrices is introduced. Noncoherent communication over the Rayleigh flat fading channel with multiple transmit and receive antennas, where no channel state information is available at the receiver is investigated. Codes achieving bit-error rate (BER) lower than 10^-4 at bit energy over the noise spectral density ratio (E_b/N₀) of 1.6-1.9 dB from code restricted capacity limit were found. At higher data rates, computation of code restricted capacity is impractical. Therefore, the mutual information upper bound of the capacity attaining isotropically random unitary transmit matrices was used. The codes achieve BER lower than 10^-4 at E_b/N₀ of 3.2-6 dB from this bound, with coding rates of 1.125-5.06 bits per channel use, and different modulation decoding complexities. The codes comprise a serial concatenation of turbo code and a unitary matrix differential modulation code. The receiver employs the high-performance coupled iterative decoding of the turbo code and the modulation code. Information theoretic arguments are harnessed to form guidelines for code design and to evaluate performance of the iterative decoder.