Error performance of interleaved trellis-coded PSK modulations in correlated Rayleigh fading channels

The authors derive an exact and easily computed expression for the pairwise error event probability of interleaved coded PSK modulations transmitted over channels with correlated Rayleigh flat fading and additive white Gaussian noise. Both coherent and differential detection are considered. In the case of coded DPSK, it is found that full interleaving does not necessarily provide the best error performance, especially when the fading is relatively fast and when the autocorrelation function of the channel fading process exhibits an oscillating behavior. For coherent detection or for differential detection in channels with relatively slow fading, increasing the interleaving depth always improves the error performance. In these cases, an interleaving depth equivalent to one-fifth to one-quarter the duration of a fade cycle is almost as good as full interleaving