Unequal Error Protection in BICM with QAM Constellations: Interleaver and Code Design

In this paper we present a general methodology for the interleaver and code design for QAM-based BICM transmissions. We develop analytical bounds on the bit error rate and we use them to predict the performance of BICM when unequal error protection (UEP) is introduced by the constellation labeling. Based on these bounds, the optimum design of interleaver and code is presented. The improvements obtained reached 2 dB for the analyzed cases, and are obtained without complexity increase. Although previous works noted the influence of the interleaver design and the UEP, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze formally this problem for BICM transmissions.