Space Time Turbo Codes assisted by Fast Forced Symbol Method

The recent advancement in the computational power made it possible to use the powerful error correcting codes such as the turbo codes with the Space-Time Coding (STC) to provide both coding gain and diversity gain to the wireless communication systems to improve the error rate performance at very low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In this paper, we propose a technique to improve the error rate performance of the Space-Time Turbo Codes (ST-TCs) which does not require any significant change in the design of the existing encoder and the decoder. Usually, to improve the error rate performance of the ST-TC, an increase in diversity order (i.e., increase in the number of antennas) of the communication system is required. Unfortunately, this does not only increase the decoding complexity exponentially but also it requires major changes in the design of the encoder and the decoder. The proposed ST-TC is assisted by a novel Fast Forced Symbol Method (FFSM) which significantly improves the coding gain of the standard ST-TC.