Error performance analysis of quadrature partial response trellis coded modulation (QPR-TCM) in fading mobile satellite channels

In order to improve the bandwidth efficiency and error performance, partial response signaling (PRS) and trellis coded modulation (TCM) are combined together. This method is named QPR-TCM. Whereas previous contributions have considered the performance of TCM transmitted over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, the emphasis in this paper is on the performance of trellis coded M-ary QAM combined with PRS in the fading environment. We only consider the case where interleaving/deinterleaving is employed to further combat the fading and assume that the ideal channel state information (CSI) is available. Analytical upper bounds are derived using the well known transfer function bounding technique, the bandwidth efficiencies are computed and the numerical results for several practical schemes are compared to each other. One interesting result is that when the combined system is used on a Rician fading channel, the bit error probability upper bounds of the proposed 6QPR-TCM and 9QPR-TCM systems are better than their counterparts the 4QAM-TCM systems with 2 and 4 states, respectively, for SNR values greater than a threshold, which have the best error performances in the literature.<>