BICM-ID with signal space diversity over cascaded rayleigh fading channels [transactions letters]

Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) using signal space diversity (SSD) is considered for cascaded Rayleigh fading channels. A tight bound on the asymptotic error probability is derived to determine the optimal rotation matrix for SSD design and to identify the key parameters that influence the system performance. It is shown that, for small modulation constellation, a cascaded Rayleigh fading causes a much more severe performance degradation than a conventional Rayleigh fading. However, BICM-ID employing SSD with a sufficiently large constellation can close the performance gap between the conventional and cascaded Rayleigh fading channels, and their performance can closely approach that over an AWGN channel. Illustrative simulation results for various scenarios are in a good agreement with analytical derivations.