Block turbo codes for space-time systems

Recent advances in the held of Information Theory have shown that wireless systems using multiple transmitters and multiple receivers can significantly improve spectral efficiencies. Systems using transmit and receive diversity associated with coding such as Space Time Trellis codes have since been developed. More recently, a scheme using Convolutional Turbo Codes (CTC) [1] with two transmitters and two receivers has been proposed [2] and exhibits significant gains over Space Time Trellis codes (up to 6 dB at a BER of 10(-5)). Our purpose is to extend that study to Block Turbo Codes (BTC) [3]. We use the (32, 26, 4)(2) extended BCH Product code with two kinds of modulation (QPSK and 16-QAM). Simulations show that ETC associated with transmit and receive diversity perform as well as CTC in terms of coding gains while achieving higher spectral efficiencies.