EXIT-chart aided near-capacity Irregular Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation design

A near-capacity irregular bit-interleaved coded modulation based iterative decoding (Ir-BICM-ID) aided scheme is proposed. The irregular design of the scheme pervades the three basic components of BICM-ID, namely the encoder, the unity-rate precoder and the bit-to-symbol mapper. As a result, irregular BICM-ID schemes constituted by irregular components are created, which are capable of approaching the capacity of coded modulation. This is achieved by creating a marginally open extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart tunnel, and exploiting the theorem that the open tunnel´s area is characteristic of how closely the scheme operates to the channel´s capacity. The proposed Ir-BICM-ID scheme employs irregular convolutional codes (IrCC), irregular unity-rate codes (IrURC) and irregular mappers (IrMapper).