Noncoherent coded space-time modulation for a large number of transmit antennas

Recently, a turbo-coded noncoherent space-time modulation scheme, which is aimed at providing both a high data transmission rate and a low receiving complexity, was proposed for noncoherent block fading channels. However, in cases where a large number of transmit antennas exist, the turbo code does not match well with the noncoherent space-time modulation scheme, and results in performance degradation. In this paper, we first investigate a coded noncoherent space-time modulation scheme using an irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. We also design a turbo-coded noncoherent space-time modulation scheme based on the codeword-interleaving strategy. The coded symbols mapped from adjacent codewords are interleaved into the same signal vectors, and the soft information from adjacent codewords are allowed to be exchanged at the receiver. When comparing to the conventional turbo-coded scheme, both proposed schemes achieve a significant improvement in BER performance.