Coding techniques for link adaptation in multicarrier systems

A novel technique for improving coding and diversity gains in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed. Multidimensional symbol design based on complex field codes with interleaving across frequency has been known for some time now. However, such symbols cannot be concatenated to convolutional codes owing to the prohibitive complexity of decoding. A novel way of designing multidimensional symbols that allow to concatenate them to convolutional codes while maintaining a low decoding complexity is shown. The proposed multidimensional symbols are based on tailbiting convolutional codes and the design of codes is discussed with desirable properties. Also the design of bit interleaved coded modulation-type and trellis-coded modulation-type codes over these multidimensional symbols is shown. Simulations show that the proposed coding scheme provides significant performance and/or complexity improvements over existing alternatives and also provides more degrees of freedom for channel-based link adaptation.