Distance spectra and performance bounds of space-time trellis codes over quasistatic fading channels

This correspondence presents a general approach to upper bounding coded system performance over quasistatic fading channels (QSFC). This approach has the advantage of yielding a closed-form upper bound that converge for all signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The proposed approach is used to upper-bound the performance of space-time trellis codes (STTC) over QSFCs. The resulting upper bounds for STTCs are better adapted to the QSFC and present an improvement over worst case pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis used so far. In its second part, this correspondence investigates several ways to reduce the complexity of computing the distance spectrum of STTCs. The combined result obtained from using the new upper bounds and the computed distance spectra are shown to be close to simulated performance for all SNRs.