Gallager Bounds for Noncoherent Decoders in Fading Channels

Recently, Gallager's bounding techniques have been used to derive tight performance bounds for coded systems in fading channels. Most works in this field have thus far dealt with coherent decoding. This paper develops Gallager bounds for noncoherent systems in fading channels. Unlike coherent decoding, the exact error probability of a noncoherent decoder/detector conditioned on the fading coefficients does not admit a closed-form expression. This difficulty is overcome in this paper by employing the Chernoff technique. Although it weakens the bounds to some extent, the Chernoff technique enables the derivations of the limit-before-average (LBA) bound and Gallager bounds in closed form for noncoherent fading channels. Numerical examples show that the proposed bounds are convergent and are tighter than the conventional union bound.