Non-overlapped interleaving for space-frequency trellis coded OFDM systems in frequency selective fading channel

The performance of space-frequency trellis coded (SFTC) OFDM system is analyzed in frequency selective fading channel. Using a pairwise error probability upper bound expression, we design the code and interleaver that can maximize the diversity and coding gain. To alleviate the performance degradation due to the inter-antenna product terms, we propose a new SFTC scheme that employs non-overlapped interleaving for each antenna. A new code is optimized for the non-overlapped interleaving and a practical sub-optimal decoding algorithm is proposed. It is shown that the proposed scheme can substantially improve the performance compared to the conventional scheme that employs identical interleaving for all antennas.