The outage probability limit is a fundamental and achievable lower bound on the word error rate of coded communication systems affected by fading. This limit is mainly determined by two parameters: the diversity order and the coding gain. With linear precoding, full diversity on a block fading channel can be achieved without error-correcting code. However, the effect of precoding on the coding gain is not well known, mainly due to the complicated expression of the outage probability. Using a geometric approach, this paper establishes simple upper bounds on the outage probability, the minimization of which yields to precoding matrices that achieve very good performance. For discrete alphabets, it is shown that the combination of constellation expansion and precoding is sufficient to closely approach the minimum possible outage achieved by an i.i.d. Gaussian input distribution, thus essentially maximizing the coding gain.

Multiple antennas are used to increase reliability and bit rate for a given bandwidth. For a fixed transmission rate, discrete input alphabets and no channel state information at the transmitter, optimal space-time codes (STCs) achieving both gains (full rate and full diversity) are well known. However, the complexity of maximum likelihood decoding increases exponentially with the number of space and time dimensions of the STC. Despite praiseworthy efforts to reduce the decoding complexity, optimal STCs are not used in practice in the case of more than two transmit antennas because of complexity reasons. It is generally accepted that reducing the dimension of the STC leads to a reduced diversity order. We show that this is not true for coded communication, assuming the presence of an outer error-correcting code with any coding rate. We propose a new class of full-rate full-diversity STCs; more specifically, time-varying space-only codes. This new class is referred to as EMI codes. Full diversity is proven in terms of outage probability, for the case where the number of receive antennas is larger than or equal to the number of transmit antennas, and is numerically verified in terms of outage and word error probability using LDPC codes.

In wireless communications, the block fading (BF) channel is an important channel model. A key quality indicator in coded transmission is the word error rate (WER), which is the fraction of packets that cannot be decoded correctly at the receiver. We study Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) coded modulation with precoding, with the aim to minimize the WER on BF channels without channel state information at the transmitter. In the literature, it was not yet known how to optimize the system parameters for this channel model, mainly due to the fading gain distribution. One of the existing approaches to combining coding and modulation is bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID). This work uses precoding to optimize BICM-ID with LDPC codes for BF channels, and is a continuation of previous work that used precoding to minimize the outage probability limit. We present the selection of the precoding matrix, the mapping function and the error-correcting code yielding a WER that closely approaches this minimum outage probability. Using a geometric approach, the off-line system optimization effort for the BF channel is limited to at most B+1 times the effort for Gaussian channels, where B is the number of blocks in the BF channel.

We study precoding for the outage probability minimization of block fading (BF) channels and BF relay channels. Recently, an upper bound on the outage probability with precoding was established for BF channels, but only for high instantaneous SNR. This upper bound is much easier to minimize than the actual outage probability, so that optimal precoding matrices can be determined without much computational effort. Here, we provide a proof for the upper bound on the outage probability at low instantaneous SNR. Next, the structure of the precoding matrix is simplified so that it can be easily constructed for an arbitrary number of blocks in the BF channel. Finally, we apply this technique to cooperative communications.

We study Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes with iterative decoding on block-fading (BF) Relay Channels. We consider two users that employ coded cooperation, a variant of decode-and-forward with a smaller outage probability than the latter. An outage probability analysis for discrete constellations shows that full diversity can be achieved only when the coding rate does not exceed a maximum value that depends on the level of cooperation. We derive a new code structure by extending the previously published full-diversity root-LDPC code, designed for the BF point-to-point channel, to exhibit a rate-compatibility property which is necessary for coded cooperation. We estimate the asymptotic performance through a new density evolution analysis and the word error rate performance is determined for finite length codes. We show that our code construction exhibits near-outage limit performance for all block lengths and for a range of coding rates up to 0.5, which is the highest possible coding rate for two cooperating users.

The outage probability limit is a fundamental lower bound on the word error rate of coded communications systems. It is mainly determined by two parameters: the diversity order and the coding gain. With linear precoding, the maximum achievable coding rate yielding full-diversity can exceed the upper limit given by the standard Singleton bound. However, the effect of precoding on the coding gain is not well understood. This paper analyzes linear precoding from an information theoretical point of view and tries to optimize the coding gain. For discrete constellations, it is shown that constellation expansion together with one optimized precoding parameter is sufficient to approach the best outage achieved by a Gaussian alphabet, thus maximizing the coding gain.

Cooperative communication offers a way to obtain spatial diversity in a wireless network without increasing hardware demands. The different cooperation protocols proposed in the literature are often studied under the assumption that all channel state information is available at the destination. In a practical scenario, channel estimates need to be derived from the broadcasted signals. In this paper, we study the Amplify-and-Forward protocol and use the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to obtain the channel estimates in an iterative way. Our results show that the performance of the system that knows the channels can be approached at the cost of an increased computational complexity. In case a small constellation is used, a low complexity approximation is proposed with a similar performance.

In wireless scenarios an effective protocol to increase the reliability for time-varying channels is the hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ). The H-ARQ scheme with cross-packet channel coding (CPC) is a recently published extension of H-ARQ with several advantages. No full-diversity low-density parity-check (LDPC) code design for the whole range of coding rates yielding full-diversity has been published. In this paper the authors provide a new outage behavior analysis and a new structured LDPC code ensemble achieving full-diversity for H-ARQ with CPC by exploiting the rootcheck principle. Simulation results show that the new code design outperforms the previous approaches, providing full-diversity and good coding gain, also at high coding rates.

Cooperative communications is a well known technique to yield transmit diversity in a multi-user environment. Network coding can increase the spectral efficiency in networks. These two techniques can be combined to achieve a double diversity order for a maximum coding rate Rc= 2/3 on the Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC), where two sources share a common relay in their transmission to the destination. However, codes have to be carefully designed to obtain the intrinsic channel diversity. Up till now, no full-diversity capacity-achieving code for the MARC at a coding rate Rc= 2/3 has been published. We present a strategy to produce excellent low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with rate 2/3, i.e., exhibiting full-diversity and operating close to the outage probability limit. Simulation of the word error rate performance of the new proposed family of LDPC codes for the MARC confirms the full-diversity.