Performance analysis of the effects of time delay spread on trellis code modulation

Time delay spread is an impairment which can seriously degrade the performance of wireless personal communication systems. This paper investigates the effects of time delay spread on unequalized trellis coded modulation (TCM) in multipath fading channels. Explicit bounds for the pairwise error probability (PEP) of TCM over such channels are derived and then used to evaluate TCM performance as well as investigate the delay spread tolerance limit of TCM, including I-Q TCM.