Performance analysis of binary coded systems over Rician block fading channels

This paper considers the performance analysis of binary coded systems over Rician block fading channels. In the transmitter, the coded bits are interleaved prior to transmission to spread burst errors resulting from deeply faded blocks. The union bound on the bit error probability (BEP) is derived assuming uniform interleaving prior to transmission over the channel and using the weight enumerator of the code. To compute the union bound, the pairwise error probability (PEP) is derived for coherent detection with perfect and imperfect channel side information (SI) at the receiver. The bound is evaluated for convolutional codes with different values of specular power and results show that the bound predicts the performance degradation due to channel memory. Channel estimation/diversity tradeoff is investigated assuming imperfect SI.