Computing the distance spectrum of space-time trellis codes

Space-time trellis code designs mainly focus on maximizing the diversity and coding gains. However, the performance of a space-time code (frame or bit error) is also a function of its “distance spectrum”. In this work expurgated union bounds for frame and bit error probability using the distance spectrum are derived. An efficient distance spectrum computation method which uses a reduced error state diagram is proposed. Distance spectrum results for the best recently proposed codes are presented