A Turbo Detection and Sphere-Packing-Modulation-Aided Space-Time Coding Scheme

Abstract

A recently proposed space-time block-coding (STBC) signal-construction method that combines orthogonal design with sphere packing (SP), referred to here as STBC-SP, has shown useful performance improvements over Alamouti's conventional orthogonal design. In this contribution, we demonstrate that the performance of STBC-SP systems can be further improved by concatenating SP-aided modulation with channel coding and performing demapping as well as channel decoding iteratively. We also investigate the convergence behavior of this concatenated scheme with the aid of extrinsic-information-transfer charts. The proposed turbo-detected STBC-SP scheme exhibits a "turbo-cliff" at E <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">b</sub> /N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> =2.5 dB and provides E <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">b</sub> /N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0 </sub> gains of approximately 20.2 and 2.0 dB at a bit error rate of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup> over an equivalent-throughput uncoded STBC-SP scheme and a turbo-detected quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulated STBC scheme, respectively, when communicating over a correlated Rayleigh fading channel.A condensed version of this paper was presented at VTC'04 Fall, LA, USA