Bit-interleaved coded modulation

It has been shown by Zehavi (1992) that the performance of coded modulation with a Rayleigh fading channel can be improved by bit-wise interleaving at the encoder output, and by using an appropriate soft-decision metric as an input to a Viterbi decoder. In this paper we present a unified theory of bit-interleaved coded modulation, provide tools for performance analysis and give guidelines for its design.