On Active Hamming Distance Measures for Trellis Coded Modulation

Recently, active distance measures for trellis coded modulation (TCM) based on the Euclidean metric have been introduced which allow for a precise characterization of the TCM´s error correcting capabilities in the additive white Gaussian noise channel. However, there exist concatenated coding schemes with TCM as constituent codes which apply puncturing to the TCM´s code symbols and thus, the performance of these coding schemes is significantly determined by the Hamming distances of the constituent TCM. Hence, the family of active Hamming distance measures for TCM is introduced in this work, together with a matrix-based method to compute these distance measures. It is shown how they influence the performance of concatenated codes.