Turbo-coded modulation for systems with transmit and receive antenna diversity over block fading channels: system model, decoding approaches, and practical considerations

We study the use of turbo-coded modulation for wireless communication systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas over block Rayleigh fading channels. We describe an effective way of applying turbo-coded modulation as an alternative to the current space–time codes with appropriate interleaving. We study the performance with the standard iterative turbo decoding algorithm, as well as the iterative demodulation–decoding algorithm. In addition to the introduction of the turbo-coded modulation scheme, we consider a variety of practical issues including the case of large number of antennas, the effects of estimated channel state information, and correlation among subchannels between different transmit–receive antenna pairs. We present examples to illustrate the performance of the turbo-coded modulation scheme and observe significant performance gains over the appropriately interleaved space–time trellis codes.