Analysis of the error performance of trellis-coded modulations in Rayleigh-fading channels

This work presents an exact expression for the pairwise error event probability of trellis-coded modulation (TCM) transmitted over Rayleigh-fading channels. It includes phase shift keying (PSK) and multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) codes, as well as coherent and partially coherent (e.g. differential, pilot tone, etc.) detection. Due to the form of the exact pairwise error event probabilities, this calculation technique cannot be used with the transfer function technique to obtain an upper (union) bound on the overall bit error probability. For this reason, the authors estimate the bit error probability by considering only a small number of short error events. Through simulations, they found that the estimation is usually very accurate at high signal-to-noise ratios but not as accurate at lower signal-to-noise ratios. They study several coded modulation schemes this way. Among the results are the fact that TCM provides significant improvement in the error floor when detected differentially, and an asymmetry in the pairwise error event probability for 16 QAM