Abstract:A turbo coded cooperative orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas scheme is considered, and its performance over a fast Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated. The turbo coded OFDM incorporates MIMO (2 × 2) Alamouti space-time block code. The interleaver design, and its placement always plays a vital role in the performance of a turbo coded cooperation scheme. Therefore, a code-matched interleaver (CMI) is selected as an optimum choice of interleaver and is placed at the relay node. The performance of the CMI is evaluated in a turbo coded OFDM system over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Moreover, the performance of the CMI is also evaluated in the turbo coded OFDM system with MIMO antennas over a fast Rayleigh fading channel. The modulation schemes chosen are Binary Phase shift keying (BPSK), Quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and 16-Quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM). Soft-demodulators are employed along with joint iterative soft-input soft-output (SISO) turbo decoder at the destination node. Monte Carlo simulated results reveal that the turbo coded cooperative OFDM system with MIMO antennas scheme incorporates coding gain, diversity gain and cooperation gain successfully over the direct transmission scheme under identical conditions.