Comparative study of space time block codes and various concatenated turbo coding schemes

Space-time block codes provide substantial diversity advantages in multiple transmit antenna assisted systems at a low decoding complexity. In this contribution, we concatenate space-time codes with three turbo coding schemes, namely turbo BCH (TBCH) codes, turbo convolutional (TC) codes and turbo trellis coded modulation (TTCM) schemes for the sake of achieving significant coding gain. The issues of mapping coded bits of the TBCH and TC schemes to different protection classes of various multilevel modulation schemes is also addressed. Finally, the performance and associated complexity of the three turbo schemes is compared.