Bit-wise demodulation for 16-QAM with BICM

Bit-wise demodulation (BWD) is a novel demodulation method used in 16-QAM with BICM. Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) proposed by Zehavi (1992) has proved to be capable of improving the performance of coded modulation over a Rayleigh fading channel by bit-wise interleaving at the encoder output, and using an appropriate soft-decision metric as an input to a Viterbi (1989) decoder. This paper aims at advancing BICM with a new demodulating method, BWD, which can achieve better performance than current BICM and a simpler structure. The BICM with BWD can be easily implemented with the same of receiver structure as QPSK.