BER bounds of a trellis coded GMSK signal

In this paper, the error bounds for trellis coded modulation, formed by combining rate-1/2 convolution coding and GMSK (B/sub 0/T=0.3), are presented for an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel as well as a channel suffering from amplitude fading. In the derivations, a Viterbi decoder is used to select the most likely transmitted sequence. The bounds obtained for the AWGN channel are tight to within 2.5 dB for the code. Computer simulations have also been carried out to verify the analytical bounds over AWGN, and frequency-flat fading channels. Simulated results over AWGN fall within 1 dB of the theoretical lower bound.