Effect of shadowing on the performance of space-time trellis coded systems

We analyze the performance of space-time trellis codes over shadowed Rician fading channels. The shadowed Rician channel is a generalization of the Rician model, where the line-of-sight path is subjected to a lognormal transformation due to foliage attenuation, also referred to as shadowing. We derive an exact expression on the pairwise error probability (PEP) for space-time trellis coded systems over this channel through the moment generating function method. The asymptotic analysis of PEP shows that the design criteria of space-time trellis codes proposed for Rayleigh fading still hold when used over shadowed Rician channels. We also present simulation results for bit error rate performance under different degrees of shadowing.