Effective design of recursive convolutional space-time codes with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas

A new class of recursive convolutional space-time codes (ReC-STC) with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas is designed by adopting several parallel two-state recursive systematic convolutional codes (RSCs). An intercross linear mapping rule that distributes the output bits of a RSC to the different positions of different transmitted signals is also described. The proposed ReC- STC can not only increase the data rate with the number of transmit antennas, but also perform well when it is used in a serially concatenated space-time code (SCSTC). The convergence analysis shows that ReC-STC based SCSTC has lower decoding threshold than the available SCSTC.