We revisit the information-theoretic analysis of bit-interleaved coded
modulation (BICM) by modeling the BICM decoder as a mismatched decoder. The
mismatched decoding model is well-defined for finite, yet arbitrary, block
lengths, and naturally captures the channel memory among the bits belonging to
the same symbol. We give two independent proofs of the achievability of the
BICM capacity calculated by Caire et al. where BICM was modeled as a set of
independent parallel binary-input channels whose output is the bitwise
log-likelihood ratio. Our first achievability proof uses typical sequences, and
shows that due to the random coding construction, the interleaver is not
required. The second proof is based on the random coding error exponents with
mismatched decoding, where the largest achievable rate is the generalized
mutual information. We show that the generalized mutual information of the
mismatched decoder coincides with the infinite-interleaver BICM capacity. We
also show that the error exponent -and hence the cutoff rate- of the BICM
mismatched decoder is upper bounded by that of coded modulation and may thus be
lower than in the infinite-interleaved model. We also consider the mutual
information appearing in the analysis of iterative decoding of BICM with EXIT
charts. We show that the corresponding symbol metric has knowledge of the
transmitted symbol and the EXIT mutual information admits a representation as a
pseudo-generalized mutual information, which is in general not achievable. A
different symbol decoding metric, for which the extrinsic side information
refers to the hypothesized symbol, induces a generalized mutual information
lower than the coded modulation capacity.Comment: submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Conference
version in 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Toronto,
Canada, July 200