Diversity analysis of space-time coding in cascaded Rayleigh fading channels

Cascaded Rayleigh distribution is used to model multipath fading in mobile-to-mobile communication scenarios and provides a better fit to experimental data in such scenarios compared to the conventional Rayleigh channel model. In this letter, we derive an exact expression for the pairwise error probability (PEP) of space-time trellis codes over the cascaded Rayleigh fading channel, which is in the form of a simple single finite-range integral. Through the derived PEP expression, we present the maximum diversity order achievable over such channels and demonstrate the performance degradation in comparison to conventional Rayleigh channels. Monte-Carlo simulations are further demonstrated to confirm the analytical results.