Multilevel trellis coded 16QAM with partially overlapped signal sets

Abstract

Multilevel trellis coded 16QAM with partially overlapped signal sets is introduced. It is shown with this scheme that one can achieve an asymptotic coding gain of 4.26 dB over QPSK with a bandwidth efficiency of 2.5 bit/sec/Hz. This result is due to the fact that multilevel trellis coding technique is more appropriate for utilizing the increased Euclidean distance of partially overlapped signal sets than its counterpart, TCM scheme. We explain this coding scheme in terms of performance, complexity, and set partitioning of partially overlapped 16QAM signals, and compare it with trellis coded 8PSK, 16QAM.