A Tighter Upper Bound for the BER of Convolutional Codes over Exponentially Correlated Nakagami-m Fading

In this paper, a tighter upper bound for the bit error rate (BER) of convolutional codes operating under exponentially correlated Nakagami-m fading is proposed. Our analysis relies on the derivation of new lower bounds per each eigenvalue since the BER expression is written in terms of the pairwise error probability, which by its turn depends on the eigenvalues of the channel covariance matrix. In comparison to previous results published elsewhere in the literature, the proposed bounds are shown to be tighter, specially for high signal-to-noise ratio regions, being therefore of great importance and usefulness for the forthcoming researches in the field. Moreover, this result can be generalized to all linear block codes as well as other fading models as the proposed eigenvalues' upperbounds are the main key of this work.