Protection matching: A new scheduling rule for improved design of BICM-ID systems

Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) has been verified to be a powerful transmission scheme with remarkable bit-error-rate performance. Among those well-designed BICM-ID systems, we observe that some of the channel encoders and signal mappers are inherently with the capability of multilevel protection. A new scheduling rule called protection matching which can properly schedule the data flow between the channel encoder and signal mapper with respect to the multilevel protection capability is proposed to achieve further performance improvement. Not only theoretical analysis but also simulation results are given to verify the advantage of the proposed design.