Bandwidth-efficient pilot symbol aided technique for trellis-coded modulation in land mobile satellite fading channels

A bandwidth-efficient pilot-symbol-aided technique is proposed for use with trellis-coded modulation (TCM). Computer simulation has been used to assess the effects of the technique on the bit error rate (BER) performances of trellis-coded 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (TC-16QAM) in the flat Rician and shadowed Rician fading channels corrupted with additive white Gaussian noise. The results have shown that the proposed technique needs a very low bandwidth redundancy and can work effectively at low signal-to-noise ratios, so it is suitable for use with TCM.