Design and Performance Evaluation of BICM-ID in Slow Fading Channels

The demands for high data rates and spectrally efficient modulation techniques are increasing due to the evolution of multimedia service in wireless communication systems. Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) is a bandwidth efficient transmission scheme and is well suitable for the next-generation mobile communications. But the performance of BICM-ID is poor in slow fading channels. As we know that diversity is an effective method to cope with fading and channel interleaving with error correction coding brings time diversity, an effective scheme is proposed in the paper in which a block interleaver is introduced to the BICM-ID encoder at the transmitter. This block interleaver serves as a channel interleaver which makes the burst errors induced by slow fading to be changed into random errors. Simulation results show that channel interleaving greatly improves the performance of BICM-ID in slow fading channels.