A performance analysis of trellis-coded modulation schemes over Rician fading channels

This paper presents a saddle point approximation (SAP) method to compute the pairwise error probability (PEP) of trellis-coded modulation (TCM) schemes over Rician fading channels. The approximation is applicable under several conditions, such as finite and ideal interleaving, ideal coherent and pilot-tone aided detection, and differential detection. The accuracy of this approximation is demonstrated by comparison to the results of numerical integration. When ideal interleaving is assumed, an asymptotic approximation for the PEP of ideal coherent, pilot-tone aided or differentially detected TCM is derived. This asymptotic approximation of the PEP is in a product form and much tighter than the ordinary Chernoff bound on the PEP. Also, based on the SAP, the effect of finite interleaving depth on the error performance of TCM schemes over Rician and shadowed Rician channels is studied