Performance of Viterbi Decoding on Interleaved Rician Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Viterbi decoding algorithm with/without automatic repeat request (ARQ) over a Rician flat fading channel with unlimited interleaving. We show that the decay rate of the average bit error probability with respect to the bit energy to noise ratio is of order between df and df + 1 at high bit energy to noise ratio for both cases (with ARQ and without ARQ), where df is the free distance of the convolutional code. The Yamamoto-Itoh flag helps to reduce the average bit error probability by a factor of 4f with a negligible retransmission rate. Besides, the error exponent with respect to the Rician factor is shown to be df for any fixed bit energy per noise ratio. Index Terms Coded ARQ, Feedback, Rician Fading, Error Exponents, Block Fading Channels.