Constrained Interleaved Coded Modulation

Constrained interleaved coded modulation (CICM) is introduced to map coded bits onto higher order signal constellations. A reverse Gray coding (RGC) constellation mapping policy is introduced to map groups of bits onto a selected signal constellation. Then, a CICM interleaver is designed to jointly achieve both the highest possible minimum symbol Hamming distance (MSHD) and the highest possible minimum squared Euclidean distance (MSED) for use with the selected RGC-encoded constellation. It is demonstrated that CICM schemes constructed with simple block codes can be decoded with reduced coding complexity while performing better than more-complicated TCM and BICM-ID schemes known in the literature.