New upper bound for space-time block coded spatial modulation

In this paper, we present a new upper bound for the bit error probability (BEP) of the so-called Space Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation (STBC-SM) system introduced by E. Basar et al. in [1] over a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel. Based on the Verdu's theorem [2], the concept of the spatial constellation (SC) codewords and maximum likelihood (ML) decoder in [3], the upper bound is obtained by eliminating a number of redundant pairwise error probabilities (PEPs). Our approach leads to a new upper bound, which is tighter than the union bound. Consequently, it allows us to evaluate the bit-error performance of STBC-SM systems more exactly, particularly when the signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high. © 2015 IEEE.