An improved upper bound on the performance of convolutional codes over quasistatic fading channels

This paper presents an improved upper bound on the performance of convolutional codes over quasistatic fading channels (QSFC). The bound uses a combination of a classical union bound when the fading channel is in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) state together with a new upper bound for the low SNR state. This new analytical technique produces bounds which are usually about 1 dB tighter than existing bounds. The new approach is applied to both convolutional and turbo codes as well as serially concatenated convolutional/turbo and space time block codes.