Trellis-coded modulation with bit interleaving and iterative decoding

This paper considers bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) for bandwidth- efficient transmission using software radios. A simple iterative decoding ( ID) method with hard-decision feedback is suggested to achieve better perfo rmance. The paper shows that convolutional codes with good Hamming distance property can provide both high diversity order and large free Euclidean di stance for BICM-ID, The method offers a common framework for coded modulati on over channels with a variety of fading statistics. In addition, BICM-ID allows an efficient combination of punctured convolutional codes and multip hase/level modulation, and therefore provides a simple mechanism for variab le-rate transmission.