On the serial concatenation of soft RS codes and space-time block codes over quasistatic fading channels

This paper presents a serial concatenation coding scheme that employs a Reed-Solomon (RS) outer code with soft-decision decoding and a simple space-time block inner code to improve the performance of wireless communications over quasistatic fading channels. A comparison is made with a system that uses a turbo code as an outer code with the same code rate and codeword length. Simulation results for frame error rate (FER) show that the proposed scheme can provide several dB of coding gain.