Low complexity decoding for higher order punctured trellis-coded modulation over intersymbol interference channels

Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is a power and bandwidth efficient digital transmission scheme which offers very low structural delay of the data stream. Classical TCM uses a signal constellation of twice the cardinality compared to an uncoded transmission with one bit of redundancy per PAM symbol, i.e., application of codes with rates n-1/n when 2ⁿ denotes the cardinality of the signal constellation. Recently published work allows rate adjustment for TCM by means of puncturing the convolutional code (CC) on which a TCM scheme is based on. In this paper it is shown how punctured TCM-signals transmitted over intersymbol interference (ISI) channels can favorably be decoded. Significant complexity reductions at only minor performance loss can be achieved by means of reduced state sequence estimation.