Concatenation of turbo codes and space-time block codes for fading

In this paper, we consider the concatenation of turbo codes with space-time block codes (STBCs) to improve the reliability of wireless communication over fading channels. We combined rate 1/2 turbo code as outer code and a simple two-antenna space-time block code as inner code for transmitting diversity and one receiver antenna. The iterative decoding scheme is based on MAP algorithm. The decoding complexity is mainly determined by the trellis complexity of the outer code. Simulation results show that exploiting transmit-diversity by using space-time block codes provides remarkable performance at the expense of almost no extra processing.