Error performance of serially concatenated space-time coding

In this paper, we investigate the error performance of a serially concatenated system using a nonrecursive convolutional code as the outer code and a recursive QPSK space-time trellis code as the inner code on quasi-static and rapid Rayleigh fading channels. At the receiver, we consider iterative decoding based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm. The performance is evaluated by means of computer simulations and it is shown that better error performance can be obtained by using low complexity outer and/or inner codes and the Euclidean distance criterion based recursive space-time inner codes. We also obtain new systems with large number of trasmit and/or receive antennas providing good error performance.