Abstract: The EXIT Chart analysis for the binary concatenations is generalized to the serially concatenated space-time code(SCSTC) with multiple antennas. The convergence characteristic of the iterative decoding for SCSTC is determined via the analysis of the transfer characteristic of the bitwise mutual information of each constituent code. By analyzing the effect of different constituent codes on the convergence of SCSTC, we design a class of space-time code to improve the convergence of SCSTC. Compared with the traditional SCSTC, the new designed SCSTC can converge earlier and has an approximate coding gain of 0.8 dB.

Key words: serially concatenated space-time code, extrinsic transfer characteristics, convergence