Abstract-In this contribution we present some analytical performance bounds that point out the key parameters dominating the performance of symbol-by-symbol combined-type maximum a posteriori equalizers/decoders for trellis-coded modulation (TCM) transmissions over fast-faded intersymbol-interference-impaired Rayleigh-channels with diversity reception. Guidelines are also provided for the design of good TCM codes matched to the statistical features of the multipath transmission links and application examples are developed that support the actual effectiveness of the presented results.Index Terms-Bhattacharyya bound, fast-variant multipath wireless channels, SbS equalization/decoding, TCM design.
I. OVERVIEW ON PUBLISHED RESULTS AND MOTIVATIONSOF THE WORK T HE exploitation of trellis-coded modulation (TCM) codes for high-throughput transmissions over bandwidth-limited time-variant wireless intersymbol interference (ISI) channels requires the utilization of adaptive receivers performing equalization and decoding, and in principle, these two tasks can be accomplished by resorting to "separate" or "combined" receiving schemes 1 [7], [10], [11, Ch. 10].Although in the "separate" schemes interleaving can be easily performed and, under the (overoptimistic) assumption of perfect equalization, standard codes designed for perfectly interleaved ISI-free channels can be employed [2, Ch. 9], [11, Ch. 7], nevertheless this attractive feature of the separate-type schemes is really counterbalanced by some important drawbacks pointed out, for example, in [7, Sec. I], [10, Sec. III-A], and [1, pp. 344, 392].Therefore, since in principle the optimal receiver should combine the equalization and decoding operations, various forms of combined-type maximum-likelihood sequence (MLS) equal- The author is with the INFO-COM Department, University of Rome "La Sapienza," 00184 Rome, Italy.Publisher Item Identifier S 0090-6778(00)10902-X.1 The relative merits of "combined" and "separate" schemes are tested in the recent contribution [7] where results about the comparison between several adaptive receiving architectures are also reported. The issue of the implementation complexity is also addressed in [7, Sec. IV], whereas in [7, Sec. V.B] we present numerical plots testing the actual effectiveness of "combined" and "separate" adaptive detectors for some GSM-type wireless channels. The effects of interleaving on the reliability of coded systems with "separate" adaptive equalization/decoding are also tested in The main goals of this contribution are to give insight into the key parameters dominating the performance of multipath impaired TCM schemes decoded via "combined" symbol-by-symbol (SbS) maximum a posteriori (MAP) minimum-error-probability equalizers/decoders [7], [12] and, then, provide effective guidelines for their optimized design. In this regard, we recall that maximum-likelihood sequence estimators (MLSEs) and SbS-MAP detectors are both optimal but under different performance criteria; in fact, MLSEs minimize the sequence-error pr...