Analysis and implementation of a multilevel coded modulation scheme based on level combination

The authors analyze and describe a coded modulation scheme based on binary component codes of intermediate length, and compare it with adversary schemes. The main novelty of the paper is a two level scheme based on combination of the second and third levels of the partition chain Z²/RZ²/2Z²/2RZ², which outperforms the adversaries. More precisely, the proposed design is based on a first level convolutional code and on a second level block code with suboptimal soft-decision decoding. The component codes have been implemented on FPGA, and implementation details and measures are reported in the paper.