An effective scheme of combining turbo-codes and transmitting diversity

We present a new scheme which combines turbo codes with transmitting diversity technique to improve the reliability of wireless communication over fading channels. We present the concatenation of 15/13, rate 1/3 turbo code as the outer code and a simple two-branch space-time block code as the inner code for transmitting diversity. A suitable iterative decoding scheme based on a MAP decision rule is designed. The decoding complexity is mainly determined by the trellis complexity of the outer code. Simulation shows that additional 1.6 dB gains can be obtained at a bit-error rate of 10/sup -5/ and a frame error rate of 10/sup -4/ for throughputs of 2/3 bits/s/Hz over an exponentially-correlated flat Rayleigh fading channel. It is shown that the scheme can be easily used in the 3G system with little change of equipment.