Pragmatic TCM codes in linear & band-limited non-linear satellite channel

A lot of work has been done to search for convolutional codes that can give the best maximEd free distance which is the criteria indicating the goodness of the codes' performance level used with Viterbi decoding. For high-rate convolutional codes, simplicity of the Viterbi decoder was sorted for ease of application, resulting in the development of punctured codes [11, which are obtained by periodically deleting a part of the bits of low-rate convolutional code. This not only enable a simplistic encoder / decoder structure, but also enable rate-selectable convolutional encoder / decoder to be implemented. In line with the search for simplistic encoder/ decoder structures, Viterbi has recommended a pragmatic approach with single half-rate encoder decoder for high-rate TCM codes, to achieve 2 and 6 b/s/Hz bandwid Lh efficiencies with signal constellations of 8 PSK and 256-QASK [2]. In this paper we show the performance of rate 2/3 8-state 8-PSK pragmatic codes in both linear Gaussian and band-limited non-linear satellite channel and how the various code generators of low-state single half-rate encoder structure ( whereby the higher rate pragmatic code encoder is built upon ) affect their performance.