Concatenated space-time block coded and turbo coded symbol-by-symbol adaptive OFDM and multi-carrier CDMA systems

Symbol-by-symbol adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) modems counteract the near instantaneous channel quality variations and hence attain an increased throughput in comparison to their fixed-mode counterparts. By contrast, various diversity techniques, such as Rake receivers and space-time coding, mitigate the channel quality variations in their effort to obtain a reduced BER. This paper investigates a combined system constituted by a constant-power adaptive modem employing space-time coded diversity techniques in the context of both OFDM and MC-CDMA. The combined system is configured to produce a constant uncoded BER and exhibits virtually error free performance, when a turbo convolutional code is concatenated with a space-time block code. It was found that the advantage of the adaptive modem erodes, as the overall diversity-order increases.