Adaptive trellis-coded multiple-phase-shift keying for Rayleigh fading channels

An adaptive scheme for trellis-coded modulation of MPSK signals, called adaptive trellis-coded multiple-phaseshift keying (ATCMPSK), is proposed for slowly Rayleigh fading channels. The adaptive scheme employs a slightly modified rate 1/2 convolutional encoder and the corresponding Viterbi decoder to realize a family of codes of different rates which are employed according to channel conditions. During poor channel conditions, trellis-coded QPSK (TCQPSK) together with repetition schemes are employed. As channel conditions improve, higher rate schemes such as trellis-coded 16 PSK are used. An interleaving/ deinterleaving method suitable for the adaptive scheme is proposed. Theoretical bounds for the error performance and an exact expression for the throughput of the proposed adaptive scheme are derived, and are compared against simulation results. Simulations have been performed to measure the performance of the scheme for different parameters and some nonideal conditions. It is shown that ATCMPSK results in considerable improvement in bit-error-rate (BER) performance of MPSK signals. Under ideal conditions, gains in the range of 3-20 dB are achieved over conventional fixed rate pragmatic trellis-coded schemes.