BER bounding techniques for selected turbo coded MIMO systems in Rayleigh fading

We consider turbo-coded MIMO systems with Rayleigh fading, when channel state information is available at the receiver only. Using our recently proposed linearly complex MIMO signal detector, we derive two bit-error-rate bounds on performance for such systems by extending the union bound method from turbo codes on the AWGN channel to time-varying MIMO fading channels. These bounds allow a designer to quantify the impact of MIMO system parameters, e.g., number of transmit / receive antennas, turbo code selection or an SNR change. Simulation results demonstrate that the derived bounds are within 0.2 - 0.5 dB of the system performance in the error floor region.