Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation

By Giuseppe Caire, Giorgio Taricco, Ezio Biglieri. Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, 2008

2,319 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The principle of coding in the signal space follows directly from Shannon's analysis of waveform Gaussian channels subject to an input constraint. The early design of communication systems focused separately on modulation, namely signal design and detection, and error correcting codes, which deal with errors introduced at the demodulator of the underlying waveform channel. The correct perspective of signal-space coding, although never out of sight of information theorists, was brought back into the focus of coding theorists and system designers by Imai's and Ungerbock's pioneering works on coded modulation. More recently, powerful families of binary codes with a good tradeoff between performance and decoding complexity have been (re-)discovered. Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) is a pragmatic approach combining the best out of both worlds: it takes advantage of the signal-space coding perspective, whilst allowing for the use of powerful families of binary codes with virtually any modulation format. BICM avoids the need for the complicated and somewhat less flexible design typical of coded modulation. As a matter of fact, most of today's systems that achieve high spectral efficiency such as DSL, Wireless LANs, WiMax and evolutions thereof, as well as systems based on low spectral efficiency orthogonal modulation, feature BICM, making BICM the de-facto general coding technique for waveform channels. The theoretical characterization of BICM is at the basis of efficient coding design techniques and also of improved BICM decoders, e.g., those based on the belief propagation iterative algorithm and approximations thereof. In this text, we review the theoretical foundations of BICM under the unified framework of error exponents for mismatched decoding. This framework allows an accurate analysis without any particular assumptions on the length of the interleaver or independence between the multiple bits in a symbol. We further consider the sensitivity of the BICM capacity with respect to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and obtain a wideband regime (or low-SNR regime) characterization. We review efficient tools for the error probability analysis of BICM that go beyond the standard approach of considering infinite interleaving and take into consideration the dependency of the coded bit observations introduced by the modulation. We also present bounds that improve upon the union bound in the region beyond the cutoff rate, and are essential to characterize the performance of modern randomlike codes used in concatenation with BICM. Finally, we turn our attention to BICM with iterative decoding, we review extrinsic information transfer charts, the area theorem and code design via curve fitting. We conclude with an overview of some applications of BICM beyond the classical coherent Gaussian channel.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c141ffa301c1cce28fb9f8b26d52fb218c715c2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Filter Bank Multicarrier Modulation Schemes for Future Mobile Communications (2017, neutral): “Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) capacity [74], [75]:”
Space shift keying modulation for MIMO channels (2009, methodology): “6For signal constellations X leading to a non-symmetric BICM channel, a method to symmetrize the channel is presented in [33].”
Survey on Free Space Optical Communication: A Communication Theory Perspective (2014, background): “BER Bit-Error-Rate BICM Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation BPSK Binary PSK CAP Carrier-less Amplitude and Phase modulation CSI Channel State Information DAPSK Differential Amplitude-Phase-Shift Keying DetF Detect-and-Forward DF Decode-and-Forward DFB Distributed Feedback DOF Degree-Of-Freedom Double G”
Wireless Information-Theoretic Security (2008, background): “This choice is motivated by the fact that BICM is known to be suboptimal over the Gaussian channel; hence, the reconciliation of the RVs and with a BICM-like scheme always requires strictly more than additional bits per symbol.”
On Probabilistic Shaping of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation for the Nonlinear Fiber Channel (2016, methodology): “For the practical bit-interleaved coded modulation schemes [35] that are also used in fiber-optics [28], a bit-wise demapper is followed by a binary decoder, as shown in Fig.”
Deep Joint Source-channel Coding for Wireless Image Transmission (2018, neutral): “The modulated symbols are then carried by the I and Q digital signal components over the communication link (the latter two components are often combined into a single coded-modulation step [22]).”
MIMO-OFDM wireless systems: basics, perspectives, and challenges (2006, neutral): “As a general guideline, the results in [16] allow us to conclude that joint code designs are necessary whenever multiple users transmit concurrently at high rates; in this case, the joint code design has to extend over the corresponding group of users.”