Signal mapping designs for bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID)

Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID)is a spectral efficient coded modulation technique to improve the performance of digital communication systems. It has been widely known that for fixed signal constellation, interleaver and error control code, signal mapping plays an important role in determining the error performance of a BICM-ID system. This thesis concentrates on signal mapping designs for BICM-ID systems. To this end, the distance criteria to find the best mapping in terms of the asymptotic performance are first analytically derived for different channel models. Such criteria are then used to find good mappings for various two-dimensional 8-ary constellations. The usefulness of the proposed mappings of 8-ary constellations is verified by both the error floor bound and simulation results. Moreover, new mappings are also proposed for BICM-ID systems employing the quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) constellation. The new mappings are obtained by considering many QPSK symbols over a multiple symbol interval, which essentially creates hypercube constellations. Analytical and simulation results show that the use of the proposed mappings together with very simple convolutional codes can offer significant coding gains over the conventional BICM-ID systems for all the channel models considered. Such coding gains are achieved without any bandwidth nor power expansion and with a very small increase in the system complexity