Block coded parallel paths TCM under fading

Abstract

Conventional Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) has beenproposed as a power efficient scheme for AWGN channel. However, in a fading channel, the performance of the scheme degrades significantly. Multiple TCM (MTCM) has been proposed as a robust scheme for fading channels. However, MTCM does not perform as a power efficienct scheme unless the fading is severe. In a land mobile stellite service environment, fading is intermittent. Therefore, there is need for a scheme which is efficient in both situations (fading and no fading). In this paper, Block Coded Parallel paths TCM (BCP-TCM) scheme is proposed. By encoding the information bits assigned to the parallel paths in TCM, the proposed scheme performs as well as conventional TCM in AWGN and as robust as MTCM in fading.