Turbo Detection of Symbol-Based Non-Binary LDPC-Coded Space-time Signals using Sphere Packing Modulation

A recently proposed space-time signal construction method that combines orthogonal design with sphere packing, referred to here as (STBC-SP), has shown useful performance improvements over Alamouti’s conventional orthogonal design. As a further advance, non-binary LDPC codes have been capable of attaining substantial performance improvements over their binary counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of STBC-SP systems can be further improved by concatenating sphere packing aided modulation with non-binary LDPC codes and performing symbolbased turbo detection. We present simulation results for the proposed scheme communicating over a correlated Rayleigh fading channel. At a BER of 10?6, the proposed symbolbased turbo-detected STBC-SP scheme was capable of achieving a coding gain of approximately 26.6dB over the identical throughput 1 bit/symbol uncoded STBC-SP benchmarker scheme. The proposed scheme also achieved a coding gain of approximately 3dB at a BER of 10?6 over a recently proposed bit-based turbo-detected STBC-SP benchmarker scheme