Outage capacity and cutoff rate of bit-interleaved coded OFDM under quasistatic frequency selective fading

IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) system which employs bit-interleaved coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the most important applications of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). The capacity and cutoff rate of BICM have been well studied in flat-fading channels assuming infinite-length ideal interleaving. This assumption is practically justifiable only in fast-fading channels. WLAN channel environment is, however, highly frequency selective while slowly varying in time. In this work, we obtain outage capacity and outage cutoff rate expressions for BICM in such quasistatic frequency selective fades, under a uniform ideal interleaving assumption. These results are also extended to the general case of space-frequency BICM (SF-BICM) which is the multiinput multioutput (MIMO) extension of BICM.