Performance analysis of a multilevel coded modulation system

A modified version of the multilevel coded modulation scheme of Imai and Hirakawa (1977) is presented and analyzed. In the transmitter, the outputs of the component codes are bit interleaved prior to mapping into 8-PSK channel signals. A multistage receiver is considered, in which the output amplitudes of the Gaussian channel are soft limited before entering the second and third stage decoders. Upper bounds and Gaussian approximations for the bit error probability of every component code, which take into account errors in previously decoded stages, are presented. Aided by a comprehensive computer simulation, it is demonstrated in a specific example that the addition of the interleaver and soft limiter in the third stage improves its performance by 1.1 dB at a bit error probability of 10^-5, and that the multilevel scheme improves on an Ungerboeck´s code with the same decoding complexity. The rate selection of the component codes is also considered and a simple selection rule, based on information theoretic arguments, is provided