Near-Capacity Irregular Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation

An irregular bit-interleaved coded modulation based iterative decoding (Ir-BICM-ID) aided scheme is proposed. The irregularity of the scheme pervades the three basic components of BICM-ID, namely the encoder, the unity-rate precoder and the bit-to-symbol mapper. As a result, adaptive BICM-ID schemes constituted by irregular components are created, which are capable of approaching the capacity of coded modulation. This is achieved by creating a narrow extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart, using a novel EXIT curve matching algorithm. The proposed Ir-BICM-ID scheme employs irregular convolutional codes (IrCC), irregular unity-rate codes (IrURC) and irregular mappers (IrMapper).