Co-channel interference canceller for interleaved coded modulation in the presence of intersymbol interference

Co-channel interference is a major impairment limiting the capacity of cellular radio systems. In order to mitigate its effect, a trellis-coded co-channel interference canceller (TCC) has been proposed which makes use of trellis-coded modulation (TCM) in resolving the ambiguity that has been a problem with the conventional approach. This canceller uses TCM with maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) of both the desired signal and co-channel interference, and outperforms conventional cancellers over static channels. In flat fading channels, however, the performance improvement owing to TCM cannot be obtained due to burst errors. An effective method for dealing with burst error channels is to interleave the coded data. In this paper, a novel algorithm which incorporates a block interleaving into the TCC is proposed to offer increased interference suppression capability over flat Rayleigh fading channels. This algorithm is a combination of interference cancellation, equalization, TCM decoding and deinterleaving, and also can be combined with a channel estimation technique. The BER performance of this algorithm is evaluated through computer simulations.