Chernoff bound of trellis-coded modulation over correlated fading channels

We derive a Chernoff upper bound for the pairwise error probability in the presence of an additive white Gaussian noise and a Rayleigh or Rice correlated fading. The bound is useful for situations where perfect interleaving cannot be achieved. We use it to determine some indications in the design of optimum trellis coded modulation for correlated fading channels