Turbo-coded modulation for systems with transmit and receive antenna diversity over block fading channels: system model, decoding approaches, and practical considerations

We study the use of turbo-coded modulation for wireless communication systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas over block Rayleigh fading channels. We describe an effective way of applying turbo-coded modulation as an alternative to the current space-time codes with appropriate interleaving. We study the performance with the standard iterative turbo decoding algorithm, as well as the iterative demodulation-decoding algorithm. In addition to the introduction of the turbo-coded modulation scheme, we consider a variety of practical issues including the case of large number of antennas, the effects of estimated channel state information, and correlation among subchannels between different transmit-receive antenna pairs. We present examples to illustrate the performance of the turbo-coded modulation scheme and observe significant performance gains over the appropriately interleaved space-time trellis codes.