Improved Performance Upper Bounds for Terminated Convolutional Codes

In this letter, we propose tight performance upper bounds for convolutional codes terminated with an input sequence of finite length. To obtain the upper bounds, a weight enumerator is defined to represent the relation between the Hamming distance of the coded output and the Hamming distance of the input bits of the code. The upper bounds on frame error rate (FER) and average bit error rate (BER) are obtained from the weight enumerator. A simple method is presented to compute the weight enumerator of a terminated convolutional code based on a modified trellis diagram.