Fast turbo codes with space-time block codes in fast fading channels

In this paper, space-time block coding has been used in conjunction with Turbo codes to provide good diversity and coding gains. A new method of dividing turbo encoder and decoder into several parallel encoding and decoding blocks is considered. These blocks work simultaneously and yield a faster coding scheme in comparison to classical Turbo codes. The system concatenates fast Turbo coding as an outer code with Alamouti's G2 space-time block coding scheme as an inner code, achieving benefits associated with both techniques including acceptable diversity and coding gain as well as short coding delay. In this paper, fast fading Rayleigh and Rician channels are considered for discussion. For Rayleigh fading channels, a fixed frame size and channel memory length of 5000 and 10, respectively, the coding gain is 7.5dB and bit error rate (BER) of 10(-4) is achieved at 7dB. For the same frame size and channel memory length, Rician fading channel yields the same BER at about 4.5dB. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.