Space Time Turbo Coded OFDM with Joint Transmit and Receive Antenna Selection

This paper discusses the performance of antenna selection technique in space time turbo coded MIMO-OFDM systems. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology can either increase the data rate through spatial multiplexing or improve the reliability through diversity. Space-time turbo codes (STTC) have been proposed to provide robust communications in MIMO wireless environment. STTC technique incorporates the methods of transmitter diversity and channel coding to provide significant reduction of error rates over the traditional communication systems. The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation method designed to mitigate multipath distortion and frequency selectivity of wireless channels at high data-rate transmissions. The MIMO-OFDM technology supports the advantages of both the MIMO system and the OFDM technique. In practice, a major impediment in MIMO-OFDM technology is the cost of hardware, because every antenna element requires a complete radio frequency (RF) chain to transmit signal over that element. In many (size and power constrained) mobile applications, it is desirable to have less RF units in multiple antenna systems which can be possible with antenna selection technique. In this paper, joint transmit and receive antenna selection for a space-time turbo coded MIMO-OFDM system is investigated. As the selection criterion, maximization of signal to noise ratio at the receiver is used for per-tone and all-tone selection methods. The simulation results show that the studied system improves performance by achieving significant diversity gains which makes it attractive for the next generation wireless standards.