Performance Analysis of a Variable Data Rate TCM Waveform Transmitted Over a Channel with AWGN and Pulse-Noise Interference.

Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is a technique where forward error correction coding and modulation are treated in a single operation without increasing the channel bandwidth. In this thesis the performance of a variable data rate TCM waveform transmitted over a channel is investigated. In general, TCM systems with rate 1/2 and rate 2/3 convolutional codes and Quandraface-shift keying (QPSK) and 8-phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation, respectively, are considered for two cases. In the first case, the number of memory elements K remains constant as the code rate increases. In the second case, the number of memory elements increases linearly with code rate, so that the total number of memory elements for 8-PSK, r=2/3 TCM is given by 1/ 2 K = 2K , where 1/ 2 K is the number of memory elements for the QPSK, r=1/2 convolutionally encoded TCM. The effects of pulse-noise interference (PNI) in addition to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) are considered. It was found that TCM systems have significant resistance to PNI when K is large enough.