Convolutionally coded DS/CDMA system using multi-antenna transmission

In this paper, we discuss the use of convolutional codes with a multi-antenna transmission scheme for DS/CDMA systems. The binary input data to a rate 1/M encoder produces M coded bits, which, in turn, are assigned to M different antennas and transmitted from each antenna simultaneously. An intentional delay of several chips duration is introduced at each antenna before transmission, which enables a receiver to distinguish the signals from different antennas. Because the proposed scheme utilizes spatial and time domains for coding, it can achieve not only implicit time-diversity through the use of coding with interleaving, but also space-diversity through the transmission from multiple antennas. Multi-antenna schemes with convolutional codes can perform better than conventional single antenna schemes with the same codes and transmission diversity technique with the same number of transmitting antennas, especially when a fading is relatively slow and interleaving size is limited.