The authors propose an analytical method, based on the sphere-packing bound, which can be used to assess the achievable performance of transmission techniques, adopting efficient block codes, over nonideally interleaved fading channels. The proposed method, which is not subject to the union bound drawbacks, represents a suitable tool for gaining insights into the effects of fading impairments on system performance. The method is used to investigate the performance of codes on block and correlated fading channels, to assess the benefits of channel interleaver, to study the effects of transmission diversity, and to evaluate some hybrid automatic repeat request schemes.
