Concatenated TCM with space-time block codes and differential M-PSK modulation

Space-time block codes provide an effective way to exploit fully both transmit diversity and receive diversity to combat the impairments of the wireless fading channel. To achieve a significant coding gain, space-time block codes have to be concatenated with an outer code. We propose a transmission system with space-time block coded differential M-PSK modulation concatenated with TCM. We describe the proposed system, which in fact is a "serial turbo code", and explain how to implement the iterative decoding in our system by use of a SISO (soft-input soft-output) module. The simulated results show that significant coding and interleaving gains are achieved in the proposed system.