A General Upper Bound to Evaluate Packet Error Rate over Quasi-Static Fading Channels

Abstract

We propose a new analytical approach to evaluate the average packet error rate (PER) of a conventional packet transmission system over a quasi static fading channel, by presenting an integral inequality lemma. The basic idea of the approach is that, given the PER for the AWGN channel as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the average PER over Rayleigh fading channel can be generally upper bounded by a quite simple inequality, i.e.,1 - exp(-w <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">o</sub> /γ̅), for both coded and uncoded schemes, where w <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">o</sub> , defined by an integral expression, corresponds exactly to the inversion of coding gain; and this bound is tight in the high SNR region or for long packet systems. We further apply the integral inequality to extend our research to more general Nakagami-m fading channel.