Analysis and performance evaluation for mapping optimization in BICM-ID with OS estimation and IC equalization

In this paper, we extend the iterative demapping technique to observation separation (OS), which is an iterative channel estimation and symbol detection procedure. We consider a bit interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) on a multipath channel with coded packet oriented transmission system with 16QAM. The channels considered are the time-invariant multipath and the channel estimation corresponds to the pseudo-inverse type. We propose here to study the influence of mapping over the performance of turbo equalization. Turbo equalization is a receiving process performing iteratively equalization and channel decoding; soft information generated by each receiving function is improved through the iterations until the optimum behavior of the system reached. In the studied system the turbo equalization and the channel estimation part is based on our previous work. In the context of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM), the iterative demapping is an iterative process between the soft demapping device and the channel decoding. We analyze here the improvement of mapping optimization for turbo equalization and we proposed an optimized binary mapping of 16-QAM constellation in order to increase coding gain, which can be used for some practically important cases. It is demonstrated that owning to a carefully designed mapping, different to the classical Gray mapping, bit error rate performance is improved.