Towards Fully Optimized BICM Transmissions
Doctoral thesis, 2010

Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) was introduced in 1992 as a new coded modulation (CM) scheme particularly well suited for fading channels and is nowadays considered the de facto CM scheme in wireless standards (HSPA, IEEE 802.11a/g/n, DVB-T2/S2/C2, etc.). A typical BICM configuration is based on a convolutional code, a single bit-level interleaver (S-interleavers), and an equally spaced quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) input alphabet. In this thesis, we investigate the design of these three building blocks and show that traditional configurations are suboptimal. The main contribution of this thesis is to formally study the design of BICM systems in fading and nonfading channels and to propose new BICM designs. First, the use of multiple interleavers (M-interleavers) in BICM and BICM with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) is formally studied. For BICM, equally spaced QAM input alphabets labeled by the binary reflected Gray code are analyzed. Analytical bounds on the bit error rate (BER) are developed and based on these bounds, the optimum interleaver design is presented. It is shown that in both BICM and BICM-ID, M-interleavers outperform S-interleavers. Furthermore, the asymptotical optimality of BICM-ID with M-interleavers over BICM-ID with S-interleavers is proven. It is also shown that the use of M-interleaver redefines the optimality of the codes used in BICM and BICM-ID. The selection of these optimal codes is also studied in this thesis. A new BICM scheme based on nonequally spaced (hierarchical) QAM input alphabets, a bit-level multiplexer, and M-interleavers is also proposed in this thesis. It is shown that this new scheme outperforms previous BICM designs in fading and nonfading channels. Analytical bounds on the BER are developed and used to optimize the design of the system. The results show that, compared to traditional BICM designs, gains of a few decibels can be obtained. Finally, we study the use of BICM when the interleaver takes a trivial form (BICM-T), i.e., when it does not interleave the bits at all. An analytical model based on a new type of distance spectrum for convolutional codes is developed. This model is used to explain why BICM-T offers considerable gains compared to previous BICM configurations. It is also shown that properly designed BICM-T systems can be asymptotically as good as TCM.

binary reflected Gray code

iterative decoding

pulse amplitude modulation

convolutional codes

trellis-coded modulation

coded modulation

Bit-interleaved coded modulation

quadrature amplitude modulation

hierarchical constellations

interleaver design

Room ED, 5th floor, Hörsalsvägen 11, Chalmers University of Technology
Opponent: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Fischer, Institute for Information Transmission, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

Author

Alex Alvarado

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Towards Fully Optimized BICM Transceivers

IEEE Transactions on Communications,; Vol. 59(2011)p. 3027-3039

Journal article

On BICM receivers for TCM transmission

IEEE Transactions on Communications,; Vol. 59(2011)p. 2692-2702

Journal article

Exploiting UEP in QAM-based BICM: Interleaver and Code Design

IEEE Transactions on Communications,; Vol. 58(2010)p. 500-510

Journal article

On BICM-ID with Multiple Interleavers

IEEE Communications Letters,; Vol. 14(2010)p. 785-787

Journal article

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

ISBN

978-91-7385-465-8

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 3146

Room ED, 5th floor, Hörsalsvägen 11, Chalmers University of Technology

Opponent: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Fischer, Institute for Information Transmission, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

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Created

10/8/2017