A Soft-Output STBC Decoder for Aeronautical Telemetry

Abstract

Alamouti encoding is a well-known space time block encoding technique used to improve the received signal quality in Rayleigh fading channels. In aeronautical telemetry, this encoding technique is applied to shaped offset quadrature phase shift keying tier generation (SOQPSK-TG) modulation in order to handle the two-antenna issue. It is provided for in telemetry-related IRIG standards. In this paper, we propose a unique decoding architecture for Alamouti-encoded SOQPSK-TG signals, taking advantage of pulse amplitude modulation decomposition with soft and hard outputs. We exploit this result to obtain a Viterbi algorithm (VA) for hard decoding and a soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) for soft and hard decoding, with a twofold benefit: operation using one trellis structure, unlike decoders that are based on the 8-waveforms cross-correlated trellis-coded quadrature modulation (XTCQM) approximation, and very attractive bit error rate performance, as well as a complexity trade-off