Distance Spectrum Calculation of Symbol Punctured Trellis Coded Modulation

A special kind of symbol-wise puncturing is applied to the code symbols of a constituent trellis coded modulation (TCM) within two very bandwidth-efficient concatenated coding schemes namely staggered TCM and parallel concatenated TCM. There exist methods to determine the minimum squared Euclidean distance of TCM for this special puncturing but they are only applicable to a limited number of TCM encoders with certain restrictions in code design. In this work, we present a general approach to calculate the distance spectrum of arbitrary TCM with symbol-wise puncturing. Thus, a deeper analysis of the error correcting capability of the underlying code is possible.