Design and testing of a real time simulation for Trellis Coded Modulation

Bibliography: leaves 75-76.The aim of this project is to build and test a real time simulation for Trellis Coded Modulation(TCM). The tests to be performed are a comparison between Ungerboeck and pragmatic codes and varying and observing different Viterbi decoder parameters for coded 8PSK. TCM is coded modulation which means the choice of modulation scheme is linked with the encoding technique. Convolutional codes are important for an understanding of TCM. They are described by the rate (which is the number of inputs over the number of outputs) and the number of memory elements, v. For TCM schemes, soft decision decoding, based on euclidean distance, rather than hard decision decoding, based on hamming distance, is used. Ungerboeck developed a mapping of encoder bits to channel signals on a constellation diagram. The mapping is called mapping by set partitioning and aims to find the smallest free euclidean distance for a given code. The free euclidean distance is the minimum euclidean distance between output sequences in a code. The asymptotic coding gain is a measure of coding gain based on the free euclidean distance