Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation

Since its introduction, Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) has been regarded as a pragmatic yet powerful scheme to achieve high data rates with general signal constellations. Nowadays, BICM is employed in a wide range of practical communications systems, such as DVB-S2, Wireless LANs, DSL, WiMax, the future generation of high data rate cellular systems (the so-called 4th generation). BICM has become the de-facto standard for coding over the Gaussian channel in modern systems. Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation provides a comprehensive study of the subject. In particular, it review its information theoretic foundations, and its capacity, cutoff rate and error exponents. It further examines the error probability of BICM, focussing on the union bound and improved bounds to the error probability before turning its attention to iterative decoding of BICM. The underlying design techniques reviewed and improved BICM schemes in a unified framework introduced. Finally, a number of applications of BICM not explicitly elsewhere covered are described. The book provides a comprehensive review of one of the most important coding schemes in modern communication systems. It will be of interest to students, practitioners and researchers working on developing 4th generation communication systems.