Application of Signal Space Diversity in BICM-ID over Cascaded Rayleigh Fading Channels

Exploiting signal space diversity (SSD) to improve the error performance of communications systems over fading channels has been shown to be a very effective technique. The application of SSD in bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) is considered for cascaded Rayleigh fading channels, which are suitable for mobile-to-mobile communications. A tight bound on the asymptotic error performance is first derived. The bound is then used to find the optimal rotation matrix. It is shown that employing SSD in a sufficiently large constellation can close the performance gap between a conventional Rayleigh fading channel and a cascaded Rayleigh fading channel. In fact, similar to the case of conventional Rayleigh fading, it is demonstrated that the error performance of BICM-ID with SSD over a cascaded Rayleigh fading channel can also closely approach the performance of BICM-ID over an AWGN channel. Various analytical and simulation results are provided to confirm the analysis.