Performance analysis and design of pilot-symbol aided TCM for a Rayleigh fading channel

A Chernoff bound is derived on the pairwise error event probability of pilot-symbol aided TCM schemes with L-fold space diversity in a Rayleigh fading channel. In the scheme, pilot-symbols are inserted periodically to estimate the channel characteristics. The fading processes experienced by the pilot-symbols are used to estimate those suffered by the data symbols using interpolation. The estimated fading characteristics are used to compute the symbol metrics of the Viterbi decoder. With the Chernoff bound derived, the cutoff rate of 16QAM and the bit error probability (BEP) of the trellis coded 16QAM scheme are calculated as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the Doppler shift. New trellis codes are constructed according to the proposed design rule and are shown to result in a performance improvement over the conventional trellis code