Concatenated Trellis Coded Modulation for Quasi-Static Fading Channels

In this paper, we present a novel concatenated trellis coded modulation (CTCM) scheme for limited diversity order fading channels. Examples for such channels include those encountered in indoor wireless networks like IEEE 802.11. It is first shown that when the diversity order afforded by the channel is fixed, bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is no longer the best way to encode. We then develop CTCM, which is superior to both BICM and conventional TCM of similar complexities. Unlike conventional TCM where convolutional codes are designed over modulated signal sets, CTCM has TCM concatenated to short length inner codes. Each trellis branch in the TCM now corresponds to a short block-code. We discuss design of good inner codes that allow for simple decoders. CTCM design incorporates useful features of both BICM and conventional TCM. Code design is explained with examples. Simulation results and information theoretic supporting the arguments are shown.