SET PARTITIONING FOR MULTILEVEL CODES ON A RAYLEIGH-FADING CHANNEL

On a Rayleigh-fading channel, multilevel codes achieve larger Hamming distances than single-level codes at comparable decoder complexity and bandwidth efficiency by employing a multistage decoder, Typically, mu ltilevel codes are designed using Ungerboeck's set partitioning, This results in a large path multiplicity that degrades the code performanc e significantly, In this letter, in order to overcome the performance degradation, we propose a set partitioning method that greatly reduces the path multiplicity.