Reduced-search trellis decoding of coded 8-PSK over flat fading channels

Families of codes that offer improved time-diversity for fading channel applications have been proposed earlier. Codes with a large number of states offer the best performance, but at the cost of high decoding effort when the Viterbi algorithm is used. In this paper, it is shown that high-diversity codes, combined with single-stage reduced-computation decoders, can offer improved performance compared to Viterbi decoding for a given decoding complexity. In addition, upper bounds have been derived for T-algorithm decoding of these codes over Rayleigh fading channels.