A genie-aided detector with a probabilistic description of the side information

Building on Forney´s concept of the genie (1972), and introducing the idea of an explicit statistical description of the side information provided to the genie-aided detector, we develop a generic tool for derivation of lower bounds on the bit-error rate of any actual receiver. With this approach, the side information statistics become design parameters, which may be chosen to give the resulting bound a desired structure. To illustrate this, we choose statistics in order to obtain a special case: the lower bound derived by Mazo (1975). The statistical description of the side information makes the lower bounding a transparent application of Bayesian theory