Turbo-coded multi-alphabet binary CPM for concatenated continuous phase modulation

Constant envelope and high spectral efficiency are among the key properties which make continuous phase modulation (CPM) a preferred choice for many applications. Numerous methods are available for designing concatenated CPM systems to achieve additional coding gains. In this paper, we propose a new serial concatenated CPM scheme. Our design uses a multi-alphabet binary CPM as an inner code, a modified turbo code as an outer code, and specially designed interleavers. The extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technique has been employed to assist the outer code design. Using soft decision decoding, we show that our design gives noticeable improvements compared with previous concatenated CPM schemes over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.