Space-time turbo trellis codes for two, three, and four transmit antennas

New space-time turbo trellis codes (ST turbo TCs) with 4-phase-shift keying (PSK) and 8-PSK for two, three, and four transmit antennas in slow and fast fading channels are proposed in this paper. The component codes of the space-time turbo schemes are constructed by choosing the feedforward coefficients to maximize the minimum squared Euclidean distance and the feedback coefficients to minimize the iterative decoding threshold. The performance of the proposed ST turbo TCs with various memory orders, transmit antennas, and interleaver structures is evaluated by simulation. It is shown that the new codes achieve better performance than previously designed codes. The impact of antenna correlation and imperfect channel estimation on the code performance is also discussed.