On BICM-ID with Multiple Interleavers

In this letter, we study the performance of BICM-ID with multiple interleavers (BICM-ID-M) in terms of bit-error rate (BER), and show that BICM-ID-M is well-suited to exploit the unequal error protection (UEP) caused by the binary labeling. We show that BICM-ID-M should always be the preferred alternative for BICM-ID and that the gains obtained appear even for the simplest configuration (0.5-0.75 dB for a BER of 10
^-7
). It is found that conventional design paradigms such as maximizing the free distance of the code should be modified.