Block turbo codes for space-time systems

Advances in the field of information theory have shown that wireless systems using multiple transmitters and multiple receivers can significantly improve the spectral efficiency. Systems using transmit and receive diversity associated with coding such as space time trellis codes have since been developed. A scheme using convolutional turbo codes (CTC) with two transmitters and two receivers has been proposed previously. It exhibits significant gains over space time trellis codes (up to 6 dB at a BER of 10/sup -5/). Our purpose is to extend that study to block turbo codes (BTC). We use the (32, 26, 4) extended BCH product code with two kinds of modulation (QPSK and 16-QAM). Simulations show that BTC associated with transmit and receive diversity perform as well as CTC in terms of the coding gains while achieving higher spectral efficiencies.