Trellis-coded 16-QAM with base station antenna switching in slow Rayleigh fading channel

The existing coders used in the fading channels are designed under the assumption that the ideal interleaver, which removes the fading correlation of the channel, is used. With the non-ideal interleaver of finite size, however, the performance of the coded modulation system degrades rapidly when the fading is very slow. So author propose a scheme to get interleaving effects by switching base station antennas in a forward link, without additional software or hardware in small handset. We derive the theoretical upper bound on the pairwise error probability and do computer simulations for BER performance. The results show significant performance improvement in the slow fading and at least no deterioration in the fast fading over the existing systems.