In this thesis, we design a robust concatenated code for the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system in the presence of slow Rayleigh fading with no channel side information at the transmitter (no CSIT) and perfect channel side information at the receiver (perfect CSIR). Since we are interested in the slow fading channel, outage capacity is used as the measure of performance. Good space-time codes can be designed so as to maximize the so-called rank and the determinant criteria. However, a practical system will concatenate a space-time code with an outer code at the transmitter and perform iterative decoding at the receiver. It is necessary to design the space-time code together with the outer code in practice. We will call this kind of code a concatenated space-time code. At the transmitter, we will consider the bit-to-symbol mapping and space-time code together as a space-time modulator and thus, Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) and Multilevel coding (ML) can be applied to design outer codes for the nonbinary constellation. However, the concatenated space-time codes designed by these two methods can only be decoded with arbitrarily small error probability for a fixed channel realization and such designs are not robust over the ensemble of fading channels. Our approach of designing concatenated space-time code is to design an outer code for a space-time modulator such that the concatenated space-time code can be decoded with arbitrarily small error probability in a set of fixed channels which have the same capacity. Through this approach, we discovered a new design criterion for spacetime codes: a good space-time code should stabilize its Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. In other words, the robustness of a space-time code in the slow fading channel and its performance in iterative decoding can be visualized by the EXIT charts. The rank and the determinant criterion do not evaluate the performance of a space-time code in iterative decoding, but the new criterion does. Therefore, the new criterion is applicable to design concatenated space-time codes. Applying our approach and new criterion, a rate 7.2 bits/s/Hz concatenated space-time code is designed. The performance is close to the outage capacity, and the rate lost is 0.2 bits/s/Hz.

This thesis presents new methodologies to improve performance of wireless cooperative networks using the Golden Code. As a form of space-time coding, the Golden Code can achieve diversity-multiplexing tradeoff and the data rate can be twice that of the Alamouti code. In practice, however, asynchronism between relay nodes may reduce performance and channel quality can be degraded from certain antennas. Firstly, a simple offset transmission scheme, which employs full interference cancellation (FIC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), is enhanced through the use of four relay nodes and receiver processing to mitigate asynchronism. Then, the potential reduction in diversity gain due to the dependent channel matrix elements in the distributed Golden Code transmission, and the rate penalty of multihop transmission, are mitigated by relay selection based on two-way transmission. The Golden Code is also implemented in an asynchronous one-way relay network over frequency flat and selective channels, and a simple approach to overcome asynchronism is proposed. In one-way communication with computationally efficient sphere decoding, the maximum of the channel parameter means is shown to achieve the best performance for the relay selection through bit error rate simulations. Secondly, to reduce the cost of hardware when multiple antennas are available in a cooperative network, multi-antenna selection is exploited. In this context, maximum-sum transmit antenna selection is proposed. End-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is calculated and outage probability analysis is performed when the links are modelled as Rayleigh fading frequency flat channels. The numerical results support the analysis and for a MIMO system maximum-sum selection is shown to outperform maximum-minimum selection. Additionally, pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis is performed for maximum-sum transmit antenna selection with the Golden Code and the diversity order is obtained. Finally, with the assumption of fibre-connected multiple antennas with finite buffers, multiple-antenna selection is implemented on the basis of maximum-sum antenna selection. Frequency flat Rayleigh fading channels are assumed together with a decode and forward transmission scheme. Outage probability analysis is performed by exploiting the steady-state stationarity of a Markov Chain model.