Cohen-Merhav bounds on the symbol error rate of uncoded signalling in AWGN interference

Using a recent Bonferroni‐type inequality proposed by Cohen and Merhav, we develop new tight lower bounds on the word error probability of uncoded systems with optimal Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) coherent detection for non‐uniform signalling over additive white Gaussian noise channel. Our results are compared to the state‐of‐the‐art Kuai‐Alajaji‐Takahara (KAT) lower bounds and it is shown that the superiority of one bound to another is dependent on the signal constellation, the amount of non‐uniformity of the Bernoulli source to be communicated and the SNR range of interest. It is noted that bounding techniques for the performance evaluation of communication systems are receiving increasing attention today, thanks to their suitability for a wide variety of schemes ranging from uncoded signalling to space–time‐coded multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.