PERFORMANCE OF A TRELLIS-CODED 16QAM/TDMA SYSTEM FOR LAND MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS

Trellis-coded 16QAM/TDMA systems are proposed that have a high spectral efficiency and high transmission quality and that can support a wide variety of services. A digital pilot-symbol-aided channel sounding scheme, as well as diversity reception with maximal ratio combining, are used to compensate for fading. To further improve transmission quality, symbol interleaving and two-frequency hopping are used in the trellis-coded 16QAM/TDMA system. Computer simulation demonstrates that the bit error rate (BER) performance and the spectral efficiency of the trellis-coded 16QAM/TDMA cellular system are superior to those of pi/4-QPSK/TDMA used in the American and Japanese digital cellular standards. It is also demonstrated that the trellis-coded 16QAM/TDMA with diversity, symbol interleaving, and frequency hopping can achieve a BER of about 10(-4) if the delay spread is 0.1 T(s).