Bit-interleaved coded modulation

Abstract

The principle of coding in the signal space follows directly from Shannon’s analysis of waveform Gaussian channels subject to an input constraint. The early design of communication systems focused separately on modulation, and error correcting codes. Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is a pragmatic approach combining the best out of both worlds: it takes advantage of the signal-space coding perspective, whilst allowing for the use of powerful families of binary codes with virtually any modulation format. As matter of fact, has established itself as a quasi-standard (de-facto) for bandwidth - and power - efficient communication, like DSL, wireless LANs, WiMax. The aim of this thesis is to describe the main aspects of the system, focusing the attention on model characteristics and on the error analysis (based on bit-error rate approximations). Finally I also consider the BICM with iterative decoding and I conclude with an overview of some applications of BIC