Rate-compatible punctured convolutionally (RCPC) space-frequency bit-interleaved coded modulation (SF-BICM)

This paper proposes a low-complexity space-frequency bit-interleaved coded modulation (SF-BICM) transceiver with successive interference cancelling (SIC) processing for multiinput multioutput (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. Two schemes are presented in order to improve the detection performance of SF-BICM perturbated by the error propagation at SIC receiver. First, the bit stream to each transmit antenna is distributed via the rate-compatible puncturing (RCP) such that the SIC process is "code-assisted". Second, a simple heuristic soft bit-metric computation is proposed to compensate for the incorrect soft information caused by the error propagation. Simulation results in the indoor wireless local area network (WLAN) channels show that the proposed RCPC SF-BICM with the new soft bit-metric has significant power gains up to 6dB over the conventional SIC receiver.