Design of Adaptive Systems for the Fading Channel Adopting Efficient Coded Modulations

The paper addresses the problem of designing an adaptive system for the fading channel, adopting efficient coded modulation techniques. Coded modulation techniques adopting turbo codes and single parity check (SPC) codes are defined and compared. The sphere-packing bound is used as a tool for selecting the proper transmission technique for a given signal to noise range. The same bounding technique is used for comparing the performance of the technique under investigation with the limiting one. In the paper it is shown that a careful choice of encoding parameters allows the SPC based techniques to achieve a very good efficiency, which is very close to the turbo codes one, and is approximately 1 dB away from the theoretical limit.