This paper shows that bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) over the Gaussian channel can achieve information rates larger than the so-called BICM capacity. For some labelings the improvement with respect to the BICM capacity is significant, especially at low and medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Specifically, natural binary labeling is found to be both first- and second-order optimal at low SNR.

This paper studies expurgated random-coding bounds and exponents for channel coding with a given (possibly suboptimal) decoding rule. Variations of Gallager's analysis are presented, yielding several asymptotic and nonasymptotic bounds on the error probability for an arbitrary codeword distribution. A simple nonasymptotic bound is shown to attain an exponent of Csiszár and Körner under constant-composition coding. Using Lagrange duality, this exponent is expressed in several forms, one of which is shown to permit a direct derivation via cost-constrained coding that extends to infinite and continuous alphabets. The method of type class enumeration is studied, and it is shown that this approach can yield improved exponents and better tightness guarantees for some codeword distributions. A generalization of this approach is shown to provide a multiletter exponent that extends immediately to channels with memory.

Mismatched decoding theory is applied to study the error exponents (both random-coding and expurgated) and achievable rates for bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). The gains achieved by constant-composition codes with respect to the the usual random codes are highlighted.

We consider bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) schemes where, instead of the true bit or symbol probabilities and the constellation used at the transmitter, the decoder uses arbitrary probabilities or reference constellations. We study the corresponding low- and high- signal-to-noise-ratio regimes and show that even in the presence of this extra sources of mismatch, BICM has a negligible penalty with respect to coded modulation.

We study analogue source transmission over MIMO block-fading channels with receiver-only channel state information. Unlike previous work which considers the end-to-end expected distortion as a figure of merit, we study the distortion outage probability. We first consider the well known transmitter informed bound, which yields a benchmark lower bound to the distortion outage probability of any coding scheme. We next compare the results with source-channel separation. The key difference from the expected distortion approach is that if the channel code rate is chosen appropriately, source-channel separation can not only achieve the same diversity exponent, but also the same distortion outage probability as the transmitter informed lower bound.