Bandwidth-efficient Bit-interleaved Coded Cooperative Communications

A cooperative coding scheme using M-ary modulation for high spectral efficiency and repetitive information transmission for diversity improvement is proposed. The encoder is a parallel concatenation of two bit-interleaved coded M-ary modulators (BICM) with scalable repetition of information symbols. As a result, the fraction of repeated information and the spectral efficiency of M-ary modulation can be used for bandwidth-performance tradeoff. Performance analysis is carried out to verify the performance advantage of the proposed system. In particular, analytical and simulation results in various block fading scenarios show that for a given bandwidth efficiency, a proper selection of the fraction of repeated information and the spectral efficiency of M-ary modulation can provide a large performance improvement.