Performance Analysis of Concatenated Convolutional Codes for STBC Systems in Pulse Jamming

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the impact of pulse jamming on Alamouti space-time block codes (STBC). We find the worst case duty cycle of a pulse jammer that maximizes the bit-error-rate (BER). We show that, like the single antenna case, with pulse jamming the BER is an inverse linear function of the signal-to-jammer power ratio (SJR). In addition, we study the transmit antenna correlation effects on the STBC system performance in terms of BER and find the corresponding optimal jamming strategy. We find that as the correlation increases, the BER maximizing duty cycle of a pulse jammer increases. As an anti-jamming technique that mitigates the jamming effects, we concatenate convolutional codes with the STBC system. The numerical result shows that convolutional codes improves the BER of the system by as much as 30 dB at 10 -- 5 BER at the expense of lowering the data rate.