Error performance of rate-5/6 multidimensional TCM in Rician and Rayleigh fading mobile channels

This paper presents the error performance of rate-5/6 multidimensional trellis coded modulation (MDTCM) techniques when applied to fading mobile channels for both cellular and mobile satellite applications. Monte-Carlo simulation is employed to obtain the error performance of 4 dimensional rate-5/6 2*8PSK with different number of encoder states in both shadowed Rician fading and Rayleigh fading mobile channels and compared with that of conventional TCM schemes such as rate-2/3 8PSK and rate-3/4 16PSK. The new results show that significant coding gain can be achieved by a suitably designed MDTCM in fading channels in comparison with simple TCM schemes. In particular, the rate-5/6 code with 8 encoder states is observed to provide nearly 8-9 dB coding gain at an output bit-error rate of 1×10^-4 in fading channels which is nearly 4-5 dB advantage when compared to the coding gain observed for all other codes chosen