Enhancements of STBC-OFDM systems by concatenating block turbo codes

A new scheme of concatenating the block turbo code (BTC) with the space-time block code (STBC) for an OFDM system in dispersive fading channels has been investigated in this paper. The good error correcting capability of BTC and the large diversity gain characteristics of STBC can be achieved simultaneously. The resulting receiver outperforms the iterative convolutional turbo receiver with MAP-EM algorithm. Because of its ability to perform the encoding and decoding processes in parallel, the proposed system is easy to implement in real time.