The design of trellis coded MPSK for fading channels: performance criteria

It has been well established that the appropriate criterion for optimum trellis-coded modulation design on the additive white Gaussian noise channel is maximization of the free Euclidean distance. It is shown that when the trellis-coded modulation is used on a Rician fading channel with interleaving/deinterleaving, the design of the code of optimum performance is guided by other factors, in particular, the length of the shortest error-event path, and the product of branch distances (possibly normalized by the Euclidean distance of the path) along the path. Although maximum free distance (d_free) is still an important consideration, it plays a less significant role the more severe the fading is on the channel. These considerations lead to the definition of a new distance measure of optimization of trellis codes transmitted over Rician fading channels. If no interleaving/deinterleaving is used, then once again the design of the trellis code is guided by maximizing d_free