Performance analysis of M-PSK TCM in two-ray fading mobile channels

In this paper, the error performance of trellis coded coherent M-PSK systems including the satellite or airplane to ground vehicle channel modeled by two-ray multipath slow frequency-nonseletive Ricean fading, is considered. An analytical pairwise error probability upper bound is derived based on the Chernoff bounding technique, which reflects the combined effects of the fading on both the amplitude and phase of the received signal, Doppler shift and time delay between direct and reflected components as well as their power ratio. The bit error rates of two 8-PSK TCM schemes optimized for AWGN and amplitude-only fading channels are evaluated both analytically using the transfer function approach and by means of computer simulation. It is denoted that the free distance is again the primary performance criterion for the considered type of channels.