Protograph Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation: A Bandwidth-Efficient Design Paradigm for 6G Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper surveys the development of protograph low-density parity-check (PLDPC) codes and their spatially-coupled variants in bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) systems, highlighting their applications in 6G wireless communications and various channel models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of PLDPC-BICM and SC variants, focusing on code construction, constellation shaping, and bit-mapper design for advanced communication systems.

Findings

PLDPC and SC codes achieve near-capacity performance in BICM systems.

The survey covers diverse channel models including AWGN, fading, PPM, and flash-memory channels.

Identifies promising future research directions in code design and system optimization.

Abstract

Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) has attracted considerable attention from the research community in the past three decades, because it can achieve desirable error performance with relatively low implementation complexity for a large number of communication and storage systems. By exploiting the iterative demapping and decoding (ID), the BICM is able to approach capacity limits of coded modulation over various channels. In recent years, protograph low-density parity-check (PLDPC) codes and their spatially-coupled (SC) variants have emerged to be a pragmatic forward-error-correction (FEC) solution for BICM systems due to their tremendous error-correction capability and simple structures, and found widespread applications such as deep-space communication, satellite communication, wireless communication, optical communication, and data storage. This article offers a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art development of PLDPC-BICM and its innovative SC variants over a variety of channel models, e.g., additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, fading channels, Poisson pulse position modulation (PPM) channels, and flash-memory channels. Of particular interest is code construction, constellation shaping, as well as bit-mapper design, where the receiver is formulated as a serially-concatenated decoding framework consisting of a soft-decision demapper and a belief-propagation decoder. Finally, several promising research directions are discussed, which have not been adequately addressed in the current literature.