A Multi-Level Design for Dirty-Paper Coding with Applications to the Cognitive Radio Channel

We propose a close-to-capacity dirty-paper coding framework which employs multi-level low density parity-check (LDPC) and trellis coded quantization. The proposed coding framework is robust in the sense that it performs close to capacity in the high as well as the low rate regimes. This is in contrast to existing practical DPC schemes which perform well at one of these regimes, but never both. In order to evaluate the performance of our scheme, we consider its application to a cognitive radio channel. At a block length of 2 × 10⁵, the designed dirty-paper coding scheme operates within 0.95, 0.58 and 0.6 dB of the theoretical limit at transmission rates of 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 bits/sample, respectively. As far as the authors are aware, this is the best performance reported in the literature so far.