Trellis Coded Block Codes: Design and Applications

This paper presents a new family of block codes referred to as Trellis Coded Block (TCB) codes, which are built using a trellis code and a linear block code (LBC). The TCB code (TCBC) construction is based on an algebraic structure inherent to many LBCs, which allows one to partition an LBC into sub-sets with a constant distance between every pair of code words in the subset. The proposed uniform sub-set partitioning is used to increase the minimum distance of the code, as in trellis coded modulation (TCM). However, unlike conventional TCM, the coding and modulation steps are separated in TCBC. An advantage of this construction is that it can be applied to both discrete as well as continuous channels, while conventional TCM is typically designed for continuous channels. The proposed TCBC is shown to be useful in a variety of applications including forward error correction, low rate quasi-orthogonal sequence generation, lattice code construction, etc. Moreover, the encoder and decoder for TCBC are realized using off-the-shelf trellis and block encoders and trellis decoders. Simulation results demonstrate the performance benefits offered by the TCBC in a variety of applications, and compares them to other existing stateof-the-art codes.