LDPC-based space-time coded OFDM systems over correlated fading channels: Performance analysis and receiver design

We consider a space–time coded (STC) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system with multiple transmitter and receiver antennas over correlated frequencyand time-selective fading channels. It is shown that the product of the time-selectivity order and the frequency-selectivity order is a key parameter to characterize the outage capacity of the correlated fading channel. It is also observed that STCs with large effective lengths and ideal built-in interleavers are more effective in exploiting the natural diversity in multiple-antenna correlated fading channels. We then propose a low-density parity-check (LDPC)-code-based STC-OFDM system. Compared with the conventional space–time trellis code (STTC), the LDPC-based STC can significantly improve the system performance by exploiting both the spatial diversity and the selective-fading diversity in wireless channels. Compared with the recently proposed turbo-code-based STC scheme, LDPC-based STC exhibits lower receiver complexity and more flexible scalability. We also consider receiver design for LDPC-based STC-OFDM systems in unknown fast fading channels and propose a novel turbo receiver employing a maximum a posteriori expectation-maximization (MAP-EM) demodulator and a soft LDPC decoder, which can significantly reduce the error floor in fast fading channels with a modest computational complexity. With such a turbo receiver, the proposed LDPC-based STC-OFDM system is a promising solution to highly efficient data transmission over selective-fading mobile wireless channels.