Signalling constellations for power-efficient bit-interleaved coded modulation schemes

Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is a bandwidth-efficient coding technique consisting of serial concatenation of binary error-correcting coding, bit-by-bit interleaving, and high-order modulation. The author addresses the problem of finding the signal sets that are most suitable for designing power-efficient BICM schemes over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. To this end, the expression of the BICM capacity limit is exploited and evaluated for several 8- and 16-ary constellations. It is also shown that the bit error probability curves of the modulation schemes without coding can be used to determine the most attractive constellations. Finally, the bit error rate performance of some BICM schemes made up of turbo codes and various signal sets is investigated to illustrate the theoretical results.