Performance of joint equalization and trellis-coded modulation on multipath fading channels

In the literature the performance of joint maximum-likelihood sequence estimation for trellis-coded modulation systems was analyzed under the assumption that fading is so slow that the channel does not change during all error events. In this paper we extend the performance analysis to general fading processes by considering the correlation function of the time-variant channel impulse response instead of assuming constant fading. An easily evaluated closed-form upper bound is derived for the pairwise error probability. The bit error rate is then estimated by using a truncated union bound. Computer simulations show that our analytical results are good for all cases considered especially when diversity reception is used.<>