Fast simulation of space-time block codes concatenated with convolutional codes over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels

The use of importance sampling for simulating concatenated space-time block codes with convolutional codes over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels is illustrated. In particular, a method is provided to bias the probability density function of Rayleigh and additive white Gaussian noise processes using the variance scaling and mean translation methods, respectively, in order to maximise the computational efficiency gain. It is demonstrated that the proposed method requires much smaller sample sizes to achieve the same accuracy than required by a conventional Monte Carlo estimator.