A Survey on Space-Time Turbo Codes

Abstract: As wireless communication systems look intently to compose the transition from voice communication to interactive Internet data, achieving higher bit rates becomes both increasingly desirable and challenging. Space-time coding (STC) is a communications technique for wireless systems that inhabit multiple transmit antennas and single or multiple receive antennas. Space-time codes make use of advantage of both the spatial diversity provided by multiple antennas and the temporal diversity available with time-varying fading. Space-time codes can be divided into block codes and trellis codes. Space-time trellis coding merges signal processing at the receiver with coding techniques appropriate to multiple transmit antennas. The advantages of space-time codes (STC) make it extremely remarkable for high-rate wireless applications. Initial STC research efforts focused on narrowband flat-fading channels. The decoding complexity of Space-time turbo codes STTC increases exponentially as a function of the diversity level and transmission rate. This proposed paper provides an over view on various techniques used for the design of space-time turbo codes. This paper also discusses the techniques handled by researchers to built encoder and decoder section for multiple transmits and receives antennas. In addition the future enhancement gives a general idea for improvement and development of various codes which will involve implementing viterbi decoder with soft decoding in a multi-antenna scenario. In addition the space-time code may be analyzed using some of the available metrics and finally to simulate it for different receive antenna configurations.