A simulation study of trellis-coded modulation for a satellite link

Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) offers a theoretical gain of more than 3 dB for an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel without an increase in signal bandwidth and without any alteration of the transmitted information rate. This article describes the simulation of TCM for an INTELSAT VI satellite link. It shows that the use of a simple four-state code can give a gain of up to 2.7 dB.