Distance Spectrum and Expurgated Union Bound of Space–Time Trellis Codes in Quasi-Static Rician Fading Channels

This paper presents a technique to obtain an expurgated union bound on the frame error rate (FER) of space-time trellis codes (STTCs) on quasi-static Rician fading channels. We first present an algorithm to compute the distance spectrum of STTCs. The proposed algorithm iteratively manipulates the entries of the transition matrix of the product state transition diagram, which is convenient for symbolic computation. Then, a new method to identify the dominant quasi-static fading error events is proposed. Comparisons with simulated results reveal that the expurgated union bound on the FER (obtained using the limiting-before-average technique) using these dominant error events is tight.