Analysis of mapping strategies for turbo-coded space-time block codes

We propose a "turbo" coding scheme for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fading channel consisting of the serial concatenation of a block code as the outer code and different orthogonal space-time block codes (STBC) for more than two transmit antennas as the inner code. Here, we consider the orthogonal STBC as a mapping scheme in space and time. At the receiver, we apply iterative space-time detection and decoding. We analyze the impact of different mapping strategies on the information transfer of the soft-input-soft-output (SISO) space-time detector. Moreover, we analytically show that additional performance gains over Gray mapping can be obtained by different mapping strategies. Furthermore, we use extrinsic information transfer characteristics (EXIT-charts) in order to predict the performance and the behavior of the system.