Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation: Fundamentals, Analysis and Design

Chapter 2Preliminaries

In this chapter, we introduce the preliminaries for this book. In particular, we introduce all the building blocks of coded modulation (CM) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) transceivers. Although some chapters are more or less self-contained, reading this chapter before proceeding further is highly recommended. This chapter is organized as follows. We introduce the notation convention in Section 2.1 and in Section 2.2 we present a general model for the problem of binary transmission over a physical channel. Coded modulation systems are briefly analyzed in Section 2.3 and the channel models of interest are discussed in Section 2.4. In Section 2.5 constellations and binary labelings are discussed. Finally, in Section 2.6, we review some of the channel codes that will be used later in the book.

2.1 Notation Convention

We use lowercase letters to denote a scalar, boldface letters to denote a length- column vector; both can be indexed as and , where