Turbo Coded Modulation for Unequal Error Protection

A major concern in designing communication systems is to maintain quality of service for a wide range of channel conditions. This is an important issue particularly for the applications where precise characterization of the channel is impossible. For such applications, the source data can be classified into several classes and Unequal Error Protection (UEP) can be used to effectively protect the more important classes even in poor receiving conditions. This paper is focused on the study, design, and performance evaluation of unequal error protecting turbo coded modulation schemes. We first propose several schemes for unequal error protecting using turbo coded modulation. All these schemes provide high performance gains for more important classes that can hardly be achieved using conventional coded modulation schemes. We then study unequal error protecting turbo coded modulation schemes by deriving channel capacity and cutoff rates for different protection levels. We show that for more important classes more room is available for improvement.