Applications of a linear precoder to multilevel turbo space-time coding

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a multilevel turbo space-time code with a pseudo-random linear precoder for use in block fading environments. Decoding is performed in an iterative multi-stage manner. Due to the multilevel structure, the data rate can be increased without exponentially increasing the decoding complexity, while, thanks to the linear precoder, full spatial diversity can be practically guaranteed without exhaustively testing each pair of the codewords. Simulation results show that the proposed system achieves a performance close to capacity limits.