Multilevel Concatenated Block Modulation Codes for the Frequency Non-selective Rayleigh Fading Channel

Abstract

This paper is concerned with construction of multilevel concatenated block modulation codes using a multi-level concatenation scheme for the frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading channel. In the construction of multilevel concatenated modulation code, block modulation codes are used as the inner codes. Various types of codes (block or convolutional, binary or nonbinary) are being considered as the outer codes. In particular, we focus on the special case for which Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are used as the outer codes. For this special case, a systematic algebraic technique for constructing q-level concatenated block modulation codes is proposed. Codes have been constructed for certain specific values of q and compared with the single-level concatenated block modulation codes using the same inner codes. A multilevel closest coset decoding scheme for these codes is proposed.