Performance of MIMO Antenna Systems with Hybrids of Transmit Diversity and Spatial Multiplexing Using Soft-Output Decoding

In this work we present some MIMO transmission schemes that combine transmit diversity and spatial multiplexing using four transmit antennas. Then, we show that the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance of these schemes can be considerably improved with the joint use of channel coding (at the transmitter) and soft-output detection (at the receiver). The SOVA approach is used to enhance performance of some detection layers that are not space-time coded. Both parallel and successive detection strategies are considered.