Performance of trellis coded star 16-QAM with diversity in Rayleigh fading channel

QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) is a very effective technique to achieve a high bit rate transmission without increasing the bandwidth. However, a high precision for fading compensation is required because information resides in both the amplitude and phase components of the QAM modulated signal. In this paper, trellis coded star 16-QAM with diversity and fading compensation in a Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated. The simulation result shows that the trellis coding and diversity largely improve the BER performance of the system. The proposed system has an improvement of about 23.5 dB over 16-QAM only fading compensation. A diversity gain of 18.5 dB and trellis coding gain of 5 dB at BER=10/sup -4/ can be obtained.