Turbo coded modulation for systems with transmit and receive antenna diversity

In a previous work Stefanov and Duman (see Proceedings of VTG-Fall, 1999) introduced turbo coded modulation for wireless communication systems with transmit and receive antenna diversity over block Rayleigh fading channels. We showed that a simple, arbitrarily picked, turbo coded modulation scheme using the 4-PSK constellation outperforms the space-time block and trellis codes significantly. In this paper we present further results on the use of turbo coded modulation for antenna diversity systems. In particular, we consider different constellation sizes and various spectral efficiencies. We observe very high gains over the corresponding space-time codes for large interleaver lengths, which is suitable for data communications. We also observe that, depending on the channel model, the turbo code block size can be chosen small enough to be suitable for speech applications, and still offer significant performance improvement in terms of frame error rates.