Code Assignment of Multilevel Coded Modulation with Iterative Decoding

Inhalt:
Iteration-aided multi-stage decoding (IA-MSD) of multilevel coded modulation (MLCM) has been recently developed to reduce the decoding complexity of the codes used on each level. This paper proposes two novel code assignment criteria for IA-MSD, since no complete assignment methodology has previously been defined. We invoke a set of three dimensional EXIT charts to show that the methods can guarantee almost full convergence, and that the overall constellation constrained capacity can be closely approached, using much less complex decoders than for conventional MSD. The second code assignment criterion also allows a wider choice of code types and code rates.