Design and performance of Space-Time trellis codes for rapid Rayleigh fading channels

Space-Time (ST) codes are known to provide high transmission rates, diversity and coding gains. In this paper, a tight upper bound on the error probability of ST codes over rapid fading channels is presented. Moreover, ST codes suitable for rapid fading channels are presented. These codes are designed using the QPSK and 16-QAM signal constellations. The proposed codes are based on two different encoding schemes. The first scheme uses a single trellis encoder, whereas the second scheme uses the I-Q encoding technique. Code design is achieved via partitioning the signal space such that the design criteria are maximized. As a solution for the decoding problem of I-Q ST codes, the paper introduces a low-complexity decoding algorithm. Results show that the I-Q ST codes using the proposed decoding algorithm outperform single-encoder ST codes with equal complexity. The proposed codes are tested over fading channels with different interleaving conditions, where it is shown that the new codes are robust under such imperfect interleaving conditions.