BER analysis for BICM transmission over flat fading channels using finite length codewords

This paper presents a theoretical analysis for the coded bit error rate (BER) performance of the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) transmission with two decoding schemes, i.e., BICM decoding and maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD). We especially focus on the influence of the codeword length on the BER. The simulation results demonstrate that such analytical results are accurate in the signal-to-noise ratio regimes of interest for general modulations and bits-tosymbol mappings (i.e., Gray and non-Gray mappings).