Performance and EXIT analysis of parallel concatenated space time trellis codes

Space time trellis coding (STTC) techniques have been proposed to achieve both diversity and coding gains in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) fading channels. But with more transmit antennas STTCs suffer from the design difficulty and complexity increasing. This paper proposes a scheme, named parallel concatenated space time trellis codes (PC-STTC), to achieve the tradeoff between the performances and complexity of STTCs for a large number of transmit antennas. Simulation results and complexity comparison are provided to demonstrate the performance and superiority of the proposed scheme over conventional schemes in fast fading channels in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. And an EXIT (extrinsic information transform) chart is given to analyze the iterative convergence of the proposed scheme. It shows that PC-STTC has better iterative convergence in low SNR regions.