Coded Modulation with Signal Space Diversity

Signal space diversity (SSD) is a well-known power- and bandwidth-efficient diversity technique with constellation rotation and coordinate interleaving. This paper investigates issues of combining SSD with coded modulation systems (CMSs), e.g., bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and its iterative version, BICM-ID. It demonstrates that the average mutual information (AMI) between the signal after rotated constellation mapping and the signal before or after the soft demapper varies with the rotation angle. A new criterion for determining the optimal rotation angle by maximizing such AMI is therefore proposed. Specific considerations of combining SSD with BICM (BICM-SSD) and BICM-ID (BICM-ID-SSD) are addressed. The demapper's extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) curve in traditional BICM-ID systems exhibits different slopes under different channels, which consequently prevents traditional BICM-ID systems from having simultaneously excellent performance under different channels. It is shown that such a different-slope problem can be simply mitigated by a proper use of SSD. Analysis and simulation show that the proposed BICM-ID-SSD systems hold a near-capacity performance under both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels simultaneously.