Performance analysis of multiple trelis coded MDPSK in an AWGN channel

The error performances of multiple trellis-coded multilevel differential PSK (MTC-MDPSK) with two different decoding schemes, where scheme 1 uses the multiple symbol detection metric developed by D. Divsalar et al. (1990) and scheme 2 uses the conventional trellis-coded MDPSK metric, are analyzed and compared. An explicit asymptotic approximation to the tail probability of a general indefinite Gaussian quadratic form is developed. Two simple MTC-MDPSK examples show that scheme 1 has better performance consistency for different codes while scheme 2 has similar performance but simpler metric and longer code diversity