Coded modulation with unequal error protection

It is always desirable to maintain communications in difficult situations, even though fewer messages can get across. The author has developed such capabilities for one-way broadcast media, such as the envisioned terrestrial broadcasting of digital high-definition television signals. In this television broadcasting, the data from video source encoders are not equally important. It is desirable that the important data be recovered by each receiver even under poor receiving conditions. Two approaches for providing such unequal error protection to different classes of data are presented. Power-efficient and bandwidth-efficient coded modulation is used in both approaches. The first approach is based on novel signal constellations with nonuniformly spaced signal points. The second uses time division multiplexing of different conventional coded modulation schemes. Both approaches can provide error protection for the important data to an extent that can hardly be achieved using conventional coded modulation with equal error protection. For modest amounts of important data, the first approach has, additionally, the potential of providing immunity from impulse noise through simple bit or signal-point interleaving