Trellis code‐aided high‐rate M‐QAM space‐time labeling diversity using a unitary expansion

In this paper, we present a high‐rate M‐ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M‐QAM) space‐time labeling diversity (STLD) system that retains the robust error performance of the conventional STLD system. The high‐rate STLD is realised by expanding the conventional STLD via a unitary matrix transformation. Robust error performance of the high‐rate STLD is achieved by incorporating trellis coding into the mapping of additional bits to high‐rate codes. The comparison of spectral efficiency between the proposed trellis code‐aided high‐rate STLD (TC‐STLD) and the conventional STLD shows that TC‐STLD with 16‐QAM and 64‐QAM respectively achieves a 12.5% and 8.3% increase in spectral efficiency for each additional bit sent with the transmitted high‐rate codeword. Moreover, we derive an analytical bound to predict the average bit error probability performance of TC‐STLD over Rayleigh frequency‐flat fading channels. The analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo simulation results, which show that the derived analytical bounds closely predict the average bit error probability performance at high signal‐to‐noise ratios (SNR). Simulation results also show that TC‐STLD with 1 additional bit achieves an insignificant SNR gain of approximately 0.05 dB over the conventional STLD, while TC‐STLD with 2 additional bits achieves an SNR gain of approximately 0.12 dB.