Performance analysis of coded systems over block fading channels

This paper considers the performance analysis of binary coded systems over block fading (BF) channels. In the transmitter, the coded bits are interleaved prior to transmission to spread burst errors resulting from deeply faded blocks. The union bound on the bit error probability (BEP) is derived assuming uniform interleaving and using the weight enumerator of the code. The union bound is a function of the pairwise error probability (PEP). Hence, the PEP is derived for coherent detection with different assumptions on the availability of the channel side information (SI) at the receiver. The proposed bound is evaluated for convolutional and turbo codes. For the case of imperfect SI, the tradeoff between channel estimation and the code's diversity is investigated. Results show that the bound provides insight on the gain loss due to channel memory.