Tight upper and lower bounds on BER performance for bit interleaved coded space-time modulation

Bit interleaved coded space-time modulation with iterative decoding (BICSTM-ID) is a concatenated coding scheme over MIMO channels, consisting of an outer code and a general inner space time modulation (STM). A tight upper bound and a tight lower bound on BER performance, based on information processing characteristics (IPC) analysis, are extended to BICSTM-ID by simplifying BICSTM-ID to an equivalent model of two combined binary channels. These bounds are later confirmed by simulation. Moreover, since the traditional upper bound on BER performance for a concatenated coding scheme is proposed under the assumption of a uniform error property, preserved only by a linear code, the IPC based upper and lower bounds on BER performance are of significant interest for estimating the performance of coding schemes with general (usually nonlinear) inner systems over MIMO channels.