Implementation and testing of super-orthogonal space time trellis codes

In wireless mobile communication systems, antenna diversity is one of the most important techniques to improve the performance. Codes suitable for antenna diversity which achieve full diversity, full rate and good coding gains are preferred when there is a small number of parallel channels. A concatenated space-time block code and multiple trellis coded modulation (STBC-MTCM) scheme achieves this goal. An 8-state STBC-MTCM with two antennas at the transmitter and one antenna at the receiver is implemented with interleaver and channel estimation on the OSU/UCLA wireless narrowband testbed. The design is described in detail. The system hardware setup is briefly overviewed and simulation bench test results are also provided. During our bench tests, an error floor was observed at high SNR's. This study is a first attempt to quantify the limits of achievable performance of real implementations of space-time coding.