An Adjustable-Rate Multilevel Coded Modulation System: Analysis and Implementation

We present the main results of a study devoted to efficient implementation of multilevel coded modulation schemes. The key point here is that the proposed design is flexible, in the sense that the same hardware allows for the implementation of several coded schemes. This goal is achieved by associating a two-dimensional binary partition chain with a set of punctured convo-lutional codes. System performance is evaluated through its error probability. This is derived from the weight enumerators of the coded modulation, and the results are confirmed by computer simulation. Hardware implementation is also described briefly.