Turbo-BLAST for wireless communications: theory and experiments

Turbo-BLAST is a novel multitransmit multireceive (MTMR) antenna scheme for high-throughput wireless communications. It exploits the following ideas: the Bell Labs layered space time (BLAST) architecture; random layered space-time (RLST) coding scheme by using independent block codes and random space-time interleaving; sub-optimal turbo-like receiver that performs iterative decoding of the RLST codes and estimation of the channel matrix in an iterative and, most important, simple fashion. The net result is a new transceiver that is not only computationally efficient compared with the optimal maximum likelihood decoder, but it also yields a probability of error performance that is orders of magnitude smaller than traditional BLAST schemes for the same operating conditions. This paper also presents experimental results using real-life indoor channel measurements demonstrating the high-spectral efficiency of turbo-BLAST.