Improved design criteria and new trellis codes for space-time trellis coded modulation in fast fading channels

The design criteria for space-time trellis codes (STTC's) in fast fading channels have been proposed: the Distance Criterion and the Product Criterion [1]. The design criteria in [1] are based on optimizing the pairwise error probability (PWEP). However, the frame error rate (FER) of STTC's depends on the distance spectrum. In this paper, we propose a new design criterion for STTC's based on the distance spectrum in fast fading channels. The proposed design criterion is based on the product distance distribution for the large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the trace distribution for the small SNR, respectively. Moreover, we propose new STTC's by the computer search based on the proposed design criterion in fast fading channels. By computer simulation, we show that the proposed design criterion is more useful than the Product Criterion in [1] in fast fading channels. We also show that the proposed STTC's achieve better FER than the conventional STTC's in fast fading channels.