The effects of time-delay spread on unequalized TCM in a portable radio environment

This paper studies the effects of time-delay spread on trellis-coded modulation (TCM) in portable radio channels, where equalization is not employed to mitigate frequency-selective fading. The average irreducible bit error rate (BER) of three different TCM schemes are analytically formulated first and then numerically evaluated by simulation. The results for a delay spread lower than 0.2 of the symbol period indicate that the performance of TCM schemes with interleaving/deinterleaving is much better than that of QPSK, and better TCM schemes for flat fading also give better performance under low delay spread. Analytical results indicate that a good TCM scheme in frequency-selective fading channels should have both a large Euclidean distance and a high degree of built-in time diversity. If higher time-delay spread is encountered, TCM does not have advantages over QPSK. We also compare TCM performance with and without diversity. It is found that diversity greatly improves the performance under low delay spread, while the diversity gain quickly diminishes as the RMS delay spread approaches 0.2 of the symbol period.