Effective design of recursive convolutional space-time codes with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas

A new class of recursive convolutional space-time codes (ReC-STC) with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas is designed by adopting several parallel two-state recursive systematic convolutional codes (RSCs). An intercross linear mapping rule that distributes the output bits of an RSC to the different positions of different transmitted signals is also described. The proposed ReC-STC can not only increase the data rate with the number of transmit antennas, but also performs well when it is used in a serially concatenated space-time code (SCSTC). The convergence analysis shows that ReC-STC based SCSTC has a lower decoding threshold than the available SCSTC.