Concatenated coding for transmit diversity systems

The concatenation of transmit diversity space-time coding with channel coding is considered. The performance of three space-time coding schemes, namely the orthogonal transmit diversity (OTD), the delay diversity and the Alamouti code diversity (ACD), in concatenation with channel codes of various rates is evaluated through analysis and extensive simulation. The analysis based on the comparison of product distance between code matrices indicates that the Alamouti code has better distance properties than the other two schemes in slow fading. Simulations show that the margins of ACD over OTD and DD range from a fraction of a dB to slightly more than a dB in most experiments