Serially Concatenated LDPC and Space-Time Trellis Codes with Transmit Antenna Selection

In this paper, the transmit antenna selection technique is proposed to be applied to a serial concatenation scheme of low-density parity-check (LDPC) and space-time trellis codes (STTC) and the frame error rate performance of this scheme is analyzed over quasi-static, block, and fast Rayleigh fading channels by computer simulations. It is shown that transmit antenna selection further improves the performance of the serial concatenation of LDPC and STTC. In particular, transmit antenna selection provides diversity gain over quasi-static and block fading channels and only coding gain over fast fading channels. It is also shown that diversity gain over fast and block fading channels is improved by increasing the number of LDPC decoding iterations