The University of British Columbia

In this letter, concatenation of trellis-coded modulation (TCM) with differential space-time block codes (DSTBC) is considered under frequency-flat Rayleigh-fading channels with and without perfect interleaver. It is shown that the design criteria of TCM concatenated with DSTBC are exactly the same as that of TCM concatenated with space-time block codes (STBC) in perfectly known channels. They are effective code length over span two symbol intervals and minimum product-sum distance over span two symbol intervals. Based on the design criteria, several new rate-2/3 systematic Ungerboeck's TCM schemes have been found by computer search. They outperform existing optimal TCM schemes designed for additive white Gaussian noise or flat fading channels.