Concatenation of space-time block codes and multilevel coding over Rayleigh fading channels

Space-time block codes (STBC) are designed to achieve the maximum possible diversity benefit. However, STBC needs to be concatenated with an outer code which provides a significant coding gain. Based on the capacity rule and a multilevel codes/multi-stage decoding (MLC/MSD) system, this paper presents three concatenation schemes of STBC and MLC/MSD. Punctured convolutional codes are selected as component codes according to the capacity rule. The performances of different hard and soft concatenation schemes are analyzed and performance comparisons are made for three mapping strategies, named Ungerboeck partitioning (UP), block partitioning (BP) and mixed partitioning (MP). Then, we present the best concatenation scheme for a mobile environment.