Following a brief historical perspective on channel coding, an introduction to space–time block codes is given. The various space–time codes considered are then concatenated with a range of channel codecs, such as convolutional and block-based turbo codes as well as conventional and turbo trellis codes. The associated estimated complexity issues and memory requirements are also considered. These discussions are followed by a performance study of various space–time and channel-coded transceivers. Our aim is first to identify a space–time code/channel code combination constituting a good engineering tradeoff in terms of its effective throughput, bit-error-rate performance, and estimated complexity. Specifically, the issue of bit-to-symbol mapping is addressed in the context of convolutional codes (CCs) and convolutional coding as well as Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem coding-based turbo codes in conjunction with an attractive unity-rate space–time code and multilevel modulation is detailed. It is concluded that over the nondispersive or narrow-band fading channels, the best performance versus complexity tradeoff is constituted by Alamouti’s twin-antenna block space–time code concatenated with turbo convolutional codes. Further comparisons with space–time trellis codes result in similar conclusions. Keywords—Channel coding, concatenated coding, FEC, history of channel coding, space–time coding, STBC, STTC.
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