On the Dimensionality of Multilevel Coded Modulation in the High SNR Regime

In this paper, the dimensionality of the multilevel coded modulation (MLCM) scheme is addressed. This study is done for an MLCM scheme with a N-dimensional (ND) constellation constructed from the Cartesian product of N identical 1D constellations in the high SNR regime. It is demonstrated that multidimensional MLCM with Reed-Solomon code components has better trade-off between coding gain and complexity than a 1D scheme. Specifically, a 4D MLCM system gains 1.4 dB over a 1D MLCM system with lower complexity at a block error of 10^-6. The gain increases to 2.5 dB asymptotically.