A new demodulating method for 16-QAM with BICM

SINCE quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) was discovered in the early 1960s, more and more research (e.g. [1,2,3,4,5]) has been done on extracting more bandwidth and power efficiencies with QAM. Coded modulation, which combines modulation and coding, has been accepted as a more efficient transmission scheme in [2]. Multilevel coding (MLC), a coded modulation scheme proposed by Imai/Hirakawa in 1977, together with multistage decoding (MSD) has been known to be optimum in the sense of channel capacity over the A WGN channel model (see [1, 7, 8]). However, over Rayleigh fading channels Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM), which was originally proposed by Zehavi. [4], gains much better performance [9, 10].