Predicting Approximate Performance Bounds for Space–Time Codes Over Quasi-Static Fading Channels

This paper provides a useful method for predicting the approximate performance of space time codes over quasi-static fading channels. Based on evaluating the signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of the extrinsic information in the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) detector, we obtain upper and lower bounds on SNR, which are the convergent limits of the SNR evolution of the extrinsic information between the MMSE detector and the a posteriori probability decoder. Based on the SNR bounds the upper and lower bounds of frame-error-rate and bit-error-rate can be assessed by averaging over the fading coefficients. The results of numerical simulations are found to be in excellent agreement with the semi-analytic bounds.