Comparison of TCM and BCM schemes on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels with soft-output algorithms

Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is well-known for achieving coding gain in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels without sacrificing additional bandwidth. Block-coded modulation (BCM) has been studied as a counterpart to TCM. In this paper, we consider the possibility of applying BCM to a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel with soft-output equalizers. A comparison of error performance between TCM and BCM has been made. Our results show that BCM schemes have comparable performance to TCM schemes with less decoding complexity and the relative performance among coding schemes depends on the type of equalizers