Unit-rate complex orthogonal space-time block code concatenated with turbo coding

Space-Time Block (STB) code has been an effective transmit diversity technique for combating fading due to its orthogonal design, simple decoding and high diversity gains. In this paper, a unit-rate complex orthogonal STB code for multiple antennas in Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode is proposed. Meanwhile, Turbo Coding (TC) is employed to improve the performance of proposed STB code further by utilizing its good ability to combat the burst error of fading channel. Compared with full-diversity multiple antennas STB codes, the proposed code can implement unit rate and partial diversity; and it has much smaller computational complexity under the same system throughput. Moreover, the application of TC can effectively make up for the performance loss due to partial diversity. Simulation results show that on the condition of same system throughput and concatenation of TC, the proposed code has lower Bit Error Rate (BER) than those full-diversity codes.