Analysis and simulation of turbo codes performance over Rice fading channels

In this work, the performance of turbo codes over the Rice multiplicative fading channel is evaluated through analysis and simulation. The analysis is conducted through improved upper bounds on bit error probabilities in conjunction with both the fully interleaved channel and the correlated Rice slow fading channel. The analytical expression of the improved bound is obtained by extending the results of Viterbi and Viterbi (see Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, p.29, 1998) to the Rice multiplicative fading channel case. Simulation results are obtained and presented also for intermediate fading rates, ranging between the two extreme multipath fading rates considered in the analysis. Simulations are performed using the improved Jakes' channel simulator to simulate Rayleigh fading channels, and extended to adequately model the multipath Rice fading propagation environment.