Product Construction of Codes for Rayleigh-Fading Channels

Coded modulation scheme of high-coding gain is presented for flat fading channels. The scheme introduces a product construction that employs two types of codes: "standard" good codes and codes that are more suitable for the fading environment. Short-blocklength codes of unique features are, thus, obtained for the bandwidth-limited regime. Using this approach, codes of bandwidth efficiencies 1, 2, and 3 bits/s/Hz are detailed. An iterative decoding algorithm for this product construction is devised. It relies on separate columns/rows decoding linked by (reliability) information transfer. Simulation results reveal that these codes compare favorably with known codes of short block-length when perfect channel state information is available to the receiver. The proposed approach is easily extended for the frequency-selective fading channel with multicarrier signaling