On BICM receivers for TCM transmission
Journal article, 2011

Recent results have shown that the performance of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) using convolutional codes in nonfading channels can be significantly improved when the interleaver takes a trivial form (BICM-T), i.e., when it does not interleave the bits at all. In this paper, we give a formal explanation for these results and show that BICM-T is, in fact, the combination of a TCM transmitter and a BICM receiver. To predict the performance of BICM-T, a new type of distance spectrum for convolutional codes is introduced, analytical bounds based on this spectrum are developed, and asymptotic approximations are presented. It is shown that the free Hamming distance of the code is not the relevant optimization criterion for BICM-T. Asymptotically optimal convolutional codes for different constraint lengths are tabulated and BICM-T is shown to offer asymptotic gains of about 2 dB over traditional BICM designs based on random interleavers. The asymptotic gains over uncoded transmission are found to be the same as those obtained by Ungerboeck's one-dimensional trellis-coded modulation (1D-TCM), and therefore, in nonfading channels, BICM-T is shown to be as good as 1D-TCM.

Bit-interleaved Coded Modulation

Coded Modulation

Pulse Amplitude Modulation

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation

Convolutional Codes

Binary Reflected Gray Code

Set Partitioning

Interleaver

Trellis Coded Modulation

Author

Alex Alvarado

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

Leszek Szczecinski

INRS-Energy, Materials and Telecommunications

Erik Agrell

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

IEEE Transactions on Communications

0090-6778 (ISSN) 15580857 (eISSN)

Vol. 59 10 2692-2702 6024422

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

DOI

10.1109/TCOMM.2011.091411.100505

More information

Latest update

3/29/2018