Design of punctured space-time trellis codes

We develop a method to puncture a space-time trellis code (STTC) that increases the code rate at the cost of increasing the frame error rate (FER). In order to minimize the FER, the puncturing pattern and constituent convolutional codes that preserve the diversity gain for the short error sequences are presented. The rate 4/3 and 8/7 punctured STTCs achieve two-level diversity gain when the constraint length is five and the frame size is 16. However, the punctured STTCs require 1.3 dB and 0.7 dB more power to attain the same FER as the STTC without puncturing, respectively.