Learning to Decode Trellis Coded Modulation

Trellis coded modulation (TCM) is a technique combining modulation with coding using trellises designed with heuristic techniques that maximize the minimum Euclidean distance of a codebook. We propose a neural networks based decoder for decoding TCM. We show experiments with our decoder that suggest the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) can improve decoding performance and provide justification for the same. We show the generalization capability of the decoder by training it with small block length and testing for larger block length. We also test our decoder for its performance on noise model unseen in the training.