Design of space-time turbo TCM on fading channels

Novel code design criteria for space-time codes on slow Rayleigh fading channels are presented. It is shown that the code performance is dominated by the minimum rank r and the minimum determinant of the codeword distance matrix when the product of the minimum rank r and the number of receive antennas n_R is less than 4. However, when r·n_R is greater than or equal to 4, the code error performance is dominated by the minimum trace of the codeword distance matrix. Furthermore, we present recursive spacetime trellis coded modulation (STTC) which outperforms feedforward STTC on slow and fast fading channels. A substantial increase in performance can be obtained by constructing spacetime turbo trellis coded modulation (ST turbo TCM) which consists of concatenated recursive STTC, decoded by iterative decoding algorithm. The proposed recursive STTC are used as constituent codes in this scheme. The proposed ST turbo TCM significantly outperforms the best known STTC on both slow and fast fading channels