New insight into the performance of TCM schemes over fast time-variant multipath-degraded faded environments

The performance symbol-by-symbol (SbS) Abend-Fritchman like combined equalizers/decoders performing diversity reception and coherent detection of trellis-coded-modulated (TCM) signals is analyzed for the case of fast time-variant, ISI-corrupted, Rayleigh-faded data-channels. New upper bounds for the resulting decoding error probability are derived and a related novel criterion for the design of TCM schemes optimally matched to the statistical properties of the transmission channel is also presented.