A novel criterion for optimum concatenation scheme (MLC-STBC) in Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, based on the characteristics of multilevel codes (MLC) and space-time block codes (STBC), the concatenation scheme combining MLC and STBC is proposed over Rayleigh fading channels. According to the fact that MLC system can achieve optimal performance according to the "capacity rule and BP (block partitioning) rule", the same topics, i.e. the optimal scheme involving in the optimal code rate design and the optimal set partitioning of MLC-STBC system are investigated in this paper. After analysis and computer simulations, a novel criterion for optimum MLC-STBC is proposed.