# On Punctured Pragmatic Space-Time Codes in Block Fading Channel

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that punctured convolutional codes can be effectively used to create pragmatic space-time trellis codes for block-fading channels, maintaining performance and decoding simplicity.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to use punctured convolutional codes for space-time coding, enabling performance gains without increasing decoding complexity.

## Key findings

- Good performance with punctured codes in block-fading channels
- Same Viterbi decoder used with approximated metrics
- Decoding complexity remains unchanged

## Abstract

This paper considers the use of punctured convolutional codes to obtain pragmatic space-time trellis codes over block-fading channel. We show that good performance can be achieved even when puncturation is adopted and that we can still employ the same Viterbi decoder of the convolutional mother code by using approximated metrics without increasing the complexity of the decoding operations.