Performance analysis of coded modulation with generalized selection combining in Rayleigh fading

We consider coded modulation with generalized selection combining (GSC) for bandwidth-efficient-coded modulation over Rayleigh fading channels. Our results show that reception diversity with generalized selection combining can conveniently trade off system complexity versus performance. We provide a number of new results by calculating the cutoff rate, and by deriving analytical upper bounds on symbol-interleaved trellis-coded modulation (TCM) and bit-interleaved-coded modulation (BICM) with GSC. All are verified by simulation. We show that our new bounds on TCM with GSC, which includes maximum ratio combining and selection combining as special cases, are tighter than the previously derived bounds. A new asymptotic analysis on the pairwise error probability, which can be used as a guideline for designing coded modulation over GSC channels, is also given. Finally, we show that BICM with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) can achieve significant coding gain over conventional coded modulation in a multiple-receiving-antenna channel.