Upper bounds to error probabilities of coded systems over AWGN and fading channels

A family of upper bounds to error probabilities of coded systems on the additive white Gaussian noise channel was recently proposed by Divsalar (see 1999 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop, Aptos, CA., 1999). Their calculation depends only on the weight spectrum of the code words. We first elaborate upon these bounds to show how they can be further tightened by using numerical integration instead of a Chernoff bound, and by reducing the number of code words to be included in the bound. Next, we extend them to fading channels