Impact of modulation and coding on the outage probability for mobile radio systems over block fading channels

Block and convolutional codes jointly with some of the most important modulation schemes are analyzed in terms of the frame error rate when used in the presence of block fading and block co-channel interference. This channel model is well suited to describe, e.g., mobile radio transmission with non-ideal interleaving and/or frequency hopping. The results are analytical for block codes, whereas they have been obtained by simulation for convolutional codes. The capacity of a mobile radio system is then derived by including shadowing and users' position. It is shown that block codes outperform uninterleaved convolutional codes when the number of hops per codeword (the diversity degree) is low.