Benchmarking Iterative Receivers for BICM Multi-Carrier Systems against Capacity Bounds

In this paper, we analyze iterative receivers for bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) multi-carrier systems and compare them against theoretical capacity bounds for the channel, coded modulation, and BICM. We map the theoretical capacity bounds into bit-error rate (BER) versus average signal-to-noise ratio per bit plots to simplify the comparison between the theoretical capacity bounds and simulated BER curves. As BER simulations show, iterative receivers with code doping or spreading reach the turbo-cliff within 1 dB or 0.3 dB of the independent Rayleigh fading channel capacity. While the iterative receiver with spreading is closer to the channel capacity than the one with code doping, the later one can eliminate the residual bit-errors after the turbo-cliff. We further present a combinatorial analysis of the distribution of the spread symbol constellation for Walsh-Hadamard spreading codes used in a BICM multi-carrier system to explain the above results