PC-CC: An advancement in forward error correction using polar and convolutional codes for MIMO-OFDM system

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas integrated with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) gains high interest due to its potential reduction on interference as well as efficient data transmission. However, the rapid growth of voluminous data and their diverse characteristics necessitate the effectiveness of error correction schemes in the recent past. The conventional error correction schemes suffer from its compatibility over the diverse data. Despite the concatenated error correction schemes meet the requirements, the precision remains uncertain under data and image transmission. This paper intends to develop an error correction scheme with the combination of Polar Coding (PC), which is an advanced coding scheme, and the renowned Convolution coding (CC). The competiveness of the proposed error correction scheme is experimented under extensive simulation constraints. Accordingly, this paper simulates MIMO-OFDM system with three antenna configurations (2 × 2), (2 × 4) and (4 × 4), which are subjected to experimentation under three modulation schemes such as Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)-16 and QAM-64. Three practical channel models such as Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), Rayleigh and Rician channel models are used in the proposed study. The performance of the proposed coding scheme is compared against the traditional error correction schemes such as CC, Reed Solomon Code (RSC)-CC, Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC)-CC and turbo-CC. The study is also extended by transmitting the data as well as image to ensure the fairness on diversity of the data characteristics. The study discloses the effectiveness of the proposed error correction scheme over the conventional error correction schemes in terms of BER (Bit Error Rate) and PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), when data and images are transmitted, respectively. The proposed method is compared with the conventional techniques and the results have shown that the PSNR performance of the proposed PC-CC method is 37.95% better than CC, 31.73% better than RSC-CC, 24.52% better than LDPC-CC and 14.12% better than turbo-CC method.