Mapping optimization for space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding

Abstract

For space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation (ST-BICM) systems with iterative decoding, the overall perfor- mance is affected by the chosen mapping. In bit error rate (BER) curves, one mapping reaches an error floor at a low signal- to-noise ratio (SNR), while other mappings result in a lower error floor at a higher SNR. The constellation mappings are divided into groups where each group exhibits a distinctive BER curve. We show that the convergence abscissa of the system depends on the average total bit errors and the harmonic mean of the minimum squared Euclidean distance. In this paper, we characterize all mapping groups for ST-BICM with 8PSK and present the optimal selection for each mapping group over independent fading channels. I. INTRODUCTION Space-time coding techniques significantly improve trans- mission efficiency in radio channels by using multiple transmit and/or receive antennas and coordination of the signaling over these antennas. Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) gives good diversity gains and Euclidean distance property with higher order modulation schemes using well known binary convolutional codes (1). Tonello (2) combined these two schemes as space-time BICM (ST-BICM) with Gray mapping. In this paper, we will first show that the asymptotic BER performance of ST-BICM system is equivalent to the single antenna BICM-ID case even when the throughput of ST-BICM is higher. This indicates that the total data rate of ST-BICM can be increased linearly with the number of transmit antennas while maintaining the same error probability as BICM-ID. This demonstrates the superior performance of ST-BICM. Motivated by the fact that the ST-BICM performance can be characterized by BICM-ID with the same code and mapping, we optimize the ST-BICM mappings based on the BICM-ID parameters. While the error floor (EF) bound (1) offers a good match for an error floor region, a heuristic analysis is still needed to study BER curve behaviors of BICM-ID for the water fall region. Thus, we derive design considerations based on both