Performance of 4-D trellis-coded modulation in the presence of polarization multiplexing

The deployment of dual-polarized antennas in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is a promising technique, allowing two spatially separated unipolarized antennas to be replaced by a single dual-polarized antenna element. In this paper, we use the four-dimensional (4-D) trellis coded modulation (TCM) as a channel code to jointly encode the parallel-transmitted dual-polarized signals. A joint decoding algorithm is proposed to jointly decode the received signals on the two orthogonal polarizations. The system performance is evaluated for both the Rayleigh fading channel and the Ricean fading channel representing the typical suburban environment of broadband fixed wireless access at 2.5 GHz.