Novel polar-coded space-time transmit diversity scheme over Rician fading MIMO channels

In this paper, a polar-coded space-time transmit diversity (STTD) scheme is proposed in order to improve the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. In Rician fading MIMO channels, the corresponding polar-coded STTD system can be equivalent to a single transmission channel for each polar code bit. Density evolutions for the polar-coded STTD systems are proposed based on the analyses of the single transmission channel. The proposed density evolutions provide preferable guidance to construct polar codes for the polar-coded STTD systems. Simulation results show that the BER performance of polar-coded STTD system is significantly improved as the number of antennas increases and the influence of the variable Rician K-factor of MIMO channels gradually vanishes. The proposed 2 × 2 polar-coded STTD system can provide better frame error rate (FER) performance than low-density parity-check (LDPC)-based system under low and mid code rates, and the average advantage is 0.3 dB approximately when the code rate is 0.25 and 0.2 dB when the code rate is 0.5.