Combining Galois with complex field coding for space-time communications

A joint scheme combining error-control coding (ECC) with complex-field coding (CFC) is proposed for space-time communications through flat or frequency-selective fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. It is shown that the diversity gain of this joint coding scheme is the product of the free distance of the ECC, the complex-field block encoder size, and the number of receive antennas, which is computationally prohibitive to achieve using ECC alone. The decoding complexity with the proposed iterative decoder is comparable to a system without CFC. Numerical simulations for perfectly interleaved and HIPERLAN channels with both single and multiple antennas show great potential of the proposed joint coding scheme.