Channel coding and antenna diversity trade-offs for indoor wireless channels

The trade-off between channel coding and antenna diversity will be a major design consideration for third generation portable transceivers. Channel coding typically represents one the most attractive means of approaching the performance limits predicted by information theory while antenna diversity is used to combat signal fading as well as cochannel interference. In view of the advent of reduced-complexity decoding algorithms for convolutional codes, the authors examine the influence of the code´s constraint length on the coding vs. diversity trade-off. Link performance over wideband TDMA quasi-static indoor channels is compared not only in terms of average bit error rate but also in terms of outage rate which is the criterion of interest for portable radio links. It is shown that channel coding may be more attractive for data applications where the bit error rate integrity criterion is more stringent than for speech applications