Serially concatenated trellis coded modulation for the compound periodic erasures channel

This paper extends the near-capacity performance of serially-concatenated convolutional codes under AWGN to periodically time-varying channels. In particular, we propose serially-concatenated trellis-coded modulations (SCTCMs) that perform consistently close to channel capacity under periodic erasures as well as under AWGN, without sacrificing AWGN channel performance. The proposed 0.5 bits/symbol, 1 bit/symbol and 1.5 bits/symbol SCTCM schemes are robust with respect to periodic time-variations with a period of two symbols.