A new analytical tool for evaluating the bit error rate of trellis coded modulation in Rician fading channel

A method is presented in this paper for the calculation of the true union bound on error performance of trellis coded modulation in Rician fading channels. As oppose to previous analyses where the union bound is approximated by the most common error events, or through the use of the Chernoff bound on individual pairwise error events in the transfer function bound, our technique uses the exact probability of individual pairwise error events in the transfer function of the code. Although more computationally intensive, the proposed technique is straight forward to implement and produces the tightest bound yet published. In addition, it is very general and is applicable to coherent, differential, and pilot-based detection, and to PSK and QAM types of constellations.