JPL PUBLICATION 86-44 Multiple Trellis Coded Modulation (MTCM)

Conventional trellis coding outputs one channel symbol per trellis branch. channel symbol combination of performance ga Here we introduce the notion of multiple trellis coding wherein more than one the a per trellis branch is transmitted. It is shown that multiple trellis coding with M-ary modulation yields n with symmetric signal sets comparable to that prev ously achieved only with signal constellation asymmetry. The advantage of multiple trellis coding over the conventional trellis coded asymmetric modulation technique is that the potential for code catastrophe associated with the latter has been eliminated with no additional cost in complexity (as measured by the number of states in the trellis diagram).