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 pilo t-symbol aided TCM schemes with L-fold space diversity in a Rayleigh fading channel. Tn the scheme, pilot symbols are inserted periodically to estimat e the channel characteristics. The fading processes experienced by the pilo t symbols are used to estimate those suffered by the data symbols using int erpolation. The estimated fading characteristics are used to compute the sy mbol metrics of the Viterbi decoder. With the Chernoff bound derived, the c utoff rate of 16QAM and the bit error probability (BEP) of the trellis code d 16QAM scheme are calculated as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and Doppler shift. New trellis codes are constructed according to the propo sed design rule and are shown to result in a performance improvement over t he conventional trellis code.