A novel concatenated block coded modulation scheme in Rayleigh fading channel

The paper proposes a novel concatenated coded modulation scheme for reliable data transmission over a Rayleigh fading channel. The outer code is a Hamming code and the inner code is a block code based on a coded modulation, which is optimized by the nonlinear optimization programming technique. Furthermore, a soft decision decoding scheme in which the soft decision is performed on not only the inner block coded modulation but also the outer Hamming code is proposed. In this decision scheme, the output symbols of the inner decoder have the reliability information, which enables the soft decision decoding of the outer code. Computer simulation result clarifies the concatenated coded modulation scheme with the soft decision decoding drastically improves the bit error rate performance in a Rayleigh fading channel. The bit error rate of 10^-4 is achieved with an average E_b/N₀ of about 8.5 dB, which shows the performance of the proposed scheme in a Rayleigh fading channel is as same as that of uncoded BPSK in an additive white Gaussian noise channel