A novel approach to combine turbo coding and high level modulation is introduced. Systematic trellis coded M-ary modulations are used as constituent codes. This scheme is a direct generalization to M-ary modulations of binary turbo codes. As a result, the whole iterative process is performed at M-ary symbol level. Analytical performance is derived and simulation results are presented.

A family of 6-D trellis-coded modulation (TCM) schemes which involve a 2-step partitioning of the constituent QAM signal alphabet is presented. With infinite constellations without shaping, the asymptotic coding gain is 3 dB for the 2-state code, 4 dB for the 4- and 8-state codes, and 5 dB for the 16- and 32-state codes which involve a smaller alphabet expansion. The authors also describe a rotationally invariant 16-state code that achieves the same asymptotic gain as its linear counterpart. Practical signal constellations are described for 6-D TCM with the spectral efficiency of uncoded 64-QAM, and the performance of these schemes is studied by means of computer simulations. It was found that they achieve an additional coding gain of 0.2-0.3 dB over infinite hypercube-type constellations. The performance of the presented schemes at practical signal-to-noise ratio values is evaluated using transfer function techniques.>

Two block-coded modulation (BCM) families particularly suited for high-capacity digital microwave radio systems are presented. The first family is based on one-step partitioning, and the second family is based on two-step partitioning of the signal constellation. The alphabet expansion is a decreasing function of the block length, and the constellation is constructed in such a way as to minimize both the average and peak signal powers. Using short block lengths, specific modulation schemes are described that transmit 4, 6, and 8 information bits per symbol. The asymptotic coding gain is only on the order of 2 dB in the first family, and of 3 dB in the second family, but their detection simplicity makes the presented BCM schemes particularly attractive for high-speed applications where trellis-coded modulation (TCM) decoders may be difficult to implement.>