Concatenation of Reed-Solomon codes and interlevel-correlated multilevel space-time codes

By concatenating an outer Reed-Solomon code with an inner multilevel space-time code, the concatenated scheme can achieve large coding gain with low decoding complexity. In this paper, a novel concatenated space-time coding scheme is proposed. Further coding gain can be attained if the inner multilevel space-time code is modified by the interlevel coding design between adjacent blocks. The error performance of an example code is compared with the traditional concatenated scheme in computer simulation.