AN IMPROVED SOVA-BASED DECODING SCHEME FOR TURBO-STCM

Parallel concatenated spa ce time trellis code modulation, called Turbo STCM, can efficiently increase the coding gains of the space time codes. However, the complexity of the iterat iv e decoding restricts its application. This paper introduces a lower complex deco ding algorithm based on soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) for Turbo STCM. S imulational results show that the new SOVA algorithm for the Turbo STCM outperf orms the original space time trellis code (STTC) by 4~6 dB. At the same time, compared with the Max Log MAP (maximum a posteriori) algorithm, the new scheme requires a lower complexity and approaches the performance of Turbo STCM decod ing w ith Max Log MAP.