Comparative study of TCM, TTCM, BICM and BICM-ID schemes

Coded modulation is a bandwidth efficient scheme that combines the functions of coding and modulation. A comparative study of trellis coded modulation (TCM), turbo trellis coded modulation (TTCM), bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and iterative decoding assisted BICM (BICM-ID) schemes over Gaussian and uncorrelated narrowband Rayleigh fading channels is presented in the context of 8-level phase shift keying (8PSK), 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) and 64QAM. We study comparatively the associated decoding complexity, block length and bandwidth efficiency. It is shown that TTCM constitutes the best compromise scheme, followed by BICM-ID.