Simplified soft-output demapper for binary interleaved COFDM with application to HIPERLAN/2

A comparison in the performance between hard- and soft-decision Viterbi decoding, with application to the HIPERLAN/2 standard, is presented. The results show that when channel state information (CSI) is included in the generation of the soft-decision information, the soft-decision method greatly outperforms the hard method. Moreover, a simplified algorithm for the soft-output demapper for the 16-QAM and 64-QAM constellations is developed, which allows the complexity of the demapper to be maintained at almost the same level for all the possible modes of HIPERLAN/2.