Capacity Approaching Layered MIMO Schemes for Quasi-Static Fading Cheannels

We focus in the design of layered transmission schemes that can approach outage capacity in quasi-static fading channels in the high spectral efficiency regime without demapper iterations. We introduce a necessary and sufficient condition for layered schemes to achieve outage capacity in quasi-static fading channels, and we use it to search for high performance layered architectures. The transmission schemes considered in the analysis are based on multilevel codes and bit-interleaved coded modulation. Multi-dimensional random labeling is shown to satisfy the proposed criterion and, therefore, its performance is very close to outage capacity