Information processing characteristic for bit interleaved coded space-time modulation

Bit interleaved coded space-time modulation with iterative decoding (BICSTM-ID) [1], [2] is an attractive strategy to achieve high power efficiency close to capacity limit by applying turbo principle to multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channels. In this paper, Information Processing Characteristic (IPC) analysis [3] is extended to MIMO systems in order to fully characterize the BICSTM-ID scheme based on a new equivalent model of combined binary input channels. The analysis results show that the IPC analysis offers an unified aspect for BICSTM and BICSTM-ID from an information theoretical point of view and provides a valuable design guideline for BICSTM-ID as well. Moreover, IPC based upper and lower bounds on BER performance [4] are applied to BICSTM-ID, which are confirmed by simulations and seem to be very useful for performance estimation of coding schemes for space-time coded MIMO channels.