Turbo codes with transmit diversity: performance analysis and evaluation

Alamouti proposed a very attractive transmit diversity technique which ensures orthogonality across two transmit antennas. This technique alone, however, offers no coding gain. In this work, powerful binary turbo codes are combined with Alamouti's diversity technique to achieve a coding gain on top of the diversity gain. Performance analysis on the combined scheme is presented and optimum turbo codes with transmit diversity on fading channels are proposed. Simulation results are shown to illustrate the improvement, this scheme can offer.