Proceedings of ICCT2013

Performance of Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation with

Iterative Decoding based Multiple-Access
Relay Cooperative Systems
Le Yu 1, Zhanji Wu 1, Fan Yang 1
1

Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China

wuzhanji@bupt.edu.cn

Abstract: Using network coding, multiple-access relay

channel makes a breakthrough at its performance. In
order to further improve the performance of the uplink, a
bit-interleaved coded modulation scheme with iterative
decoding (BICM-ID) using joint coding differential
modulation is designed. Specifically, it uses DE-16QAM
of gray mapping mode matched with convolution code.
Research has proved that in terms of quadrature
amplitude modulation, modified set partitioning (MSP)
mapping is optimal in iterative decoding scheme with
convolution code. Yet when using joint coding
differential modulation, the system has better reliability.
The simulation results also show that the proposed
scheme obtained dramatic performance gains by using
joint coding differential modulation.

of traditional transmission mode in which relay only

stores and forwards information, network coding
technology allows the relay to encode the two flow of
information from the source nodes. Specifically, the
relay uses the Boolean XOR operator to process
information in traditional network coding mode.
In order to further improve the performance of uplink of
MARC, a bit-interleaved coded modulation scheme with
iterative decoding (BICM-ID) using joint coding
differential modulation is designed in this paper. The
concept of BICM was proposed firstly in references [4].
It consists of a binary encoder, an interleaver and a
multi-system modulator, which are cascaded. Its diagram
is shown in figure 2.

Keywords: network coding; bit-interleaved coded

modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID); joint
coding differential modulation; multiple-access relay
channel (MARC)

1 Introduction
Network coding technology is a breakthrough in the
research of information processing and transmission in
communication networks. It was first used to improve
the error-free transmission ability of cable multicast
network[1], now it is widely used to improve the
performance of wireless network[2]-[3]. In this paper,
the authors study multiple access uplink, that is
multiple-access relay channel (MARC). Its model is

Figure 2 Diagram of BICM and BICM-ID

Source information is encoded by a binary encoder. The

code word is divided into M road through an interleaver
and forwarded to the 2 -ary modulator. After mapping
onto a point in signal constellation which has 2
points, the information is forwarded to the channel.
BICM scheme improves bandwidth efficiency of the
channel via using 2 -ary modulator instead of binary
modulator. Accordingly, receiving part consists of a
multi-system demodulator, a de-interleaver and a binary
decoder in series. In addition, the multi-system
demodulator and the binary decoder can work
independently or jointly. If they work independently, the
output of the demodulator is not the estimation of the
2 -ary signal points, but the likelihood estimation of
single binary bit. In this term, all of the estimations of
each binary bit of a coded word are sent to the binary
decoder via the de-interleaver. If they work jointly, the
decoding process is accomplished by iteration between
multi-system demodulator and binary decoder. In this
term, the scheme is named BICM-ID. The solid line
portion of figure 2 is BICM scheme, adding the dashed
part the figure illustrates a BICM-ID scheme.

showed in figure 1.
The two source nodes send information to the base
station via the same relay which is located between
source nodes and base station, and there is a direct link
between each of source nodes and base station. Instead
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978-1-4799-0077-0/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE



Proceedings of ICCT2013

Figure 3 MARC diagram based on BICM-ID

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2

introduces the model of BICM-ID scheme using joint
coding differential modulation based on MARC, and the
encoding and modulation process of user terminal.
Section 3 describes the principle of iterative decoding
and demodulation in details. Section 4 shows the
simulation result when the channel is AWGN. And the
performance of joint coding differential modulation with
that of joint coding non-differential modulation which
are using gray mapping are compared. Section 5
compares the performance of joint coding differential
modulation using gray mapping with that of joint coding
non-differential modulation using modified set
partitioning (MSP) mapping[6]. Discussion is concluded
in Section 6.

interleaver and then the differential encoding process is

run. At last, modulation process using predefined
mapping way is run. In addition, interleaver is used to
reduce bits correlation when the minimum hamming
distance is guaranteed, thus reducing the continuous
fading[5]. In this paper, we mark the interleaver and
de-interleaver as and   respectively. Assume that
each link is rayleigh fading wireless channel, every time
the signal that the base station receives from users can
be represented as:
(1)
Yk  hk  Xk  nk , (k  U1 , U 2 )
Every time the signal that the base station receives from
relay can be represented as:
(2)
YR  hR  XR  nR
Here  is signal of user k,  is signal of relay.
 and  are corresponding channel fading
parameters.  and  are zero mean Gaussian noise
which unilateral spectral density is .

2 System Model and Encoding Modulation

Process
2.1 System Model
The uplink structure of time division multiple access
relay system based on BICM-ID is shown in figure 3.
The two users communicate with base station via a
common relay. The system needs three time slot to finish
one time transmission. In the first time slot, source node
1 broadcasts data
to relay and base station. In the
second time slot, source node 2 broadcasts data
to
relay and base station. In the third time slot, the relay
forwards the XOR of
and
to the base station. Here
we assume that the link from users to relay is error-free.

Figure 5 Differential encoding diagram of DE-16QAM

2.2 Encoding and Modulation Process

Figure 4 Encoding and modulation diagram for users

As shown in figure 4, information data is encoded by the

encoder, here the way of channel coding can be
convolutional code, Turbo code or low density parity
check (LDPC) code. In this paper, convolutional code is
utilized. Encoded information is forwarded to the

Figure 6 Constellation points of DE-16QAM



Proceedings of ICCT2013

Figure 7 Iterative receiver diagram of base station

and,
Differential encoding process of 16 QAM is shown in
figure 5. In the figure, abcd represent a code group of
input information sequences. Encode the first two bits
differentially to determine the quadrant of the signal.
The last two bits are used to determine the configuration
of the signal vector in each quadrant, and the
configuration presents a rotating characteristic of /2.
Besides, the last two bits use gray mapping in order to
reduce the bit error rate. The differential encoded data is
mapped to the plural constellation point according to
modulation constellation mapping pattern which is
shown in figure 6.

log

P(bi , m  1| yk ,i )

 0m
1m

log 2 M

(1) l , n 

Lqk 1 (bi ,n )

n 1

of symbol sl in the set  m0or1 . Lqk 1 (bi , m ) as a prior

information of demodulator,
is LLR which is
calculated by SISO decoder and mixed by interleaver in
the last iteration.
2
In addition, k ,i ,l   | yk ,l  hk ,i sl | / N0 . It should be
q 1
noted that LR (bi , m ) , prior information of relay
demodulator, is obtained by soft information combining
based on XOR. The specific calculation formula is as
follows:

 1  exp( LUq 11 (bi , m )  LUq 21 (bi , m )) 

LqR1 (bi , m )  log 

 exp( LUq 1 (bi , m ))  exp( LUq 1 (bi , m )) 


1
2
 sign( LUq 11 (bi , m )) sign( LUq 21 (bi , m ))

min | LUq 11 (bi , m ) |,| LUq 21 (bi , m ) |

(5)

In the first iteration, initialize L0k (bi , m )  0 , i, m . We

can see in formula (4) that recalculating the soft
information of a bit of the same symbol only needs other
bits posterior probability.

 qk (bi , m ) , after a de-interleaver, maximal ratio

combining (MRC) with redundant soft information from
relay link, is forwarded to decoder as prior information.
The output of decoder is extrinsic information of
encoded bits, which is updated after an interleaver. This
is an iterative process. The finally output of iterative
decoder is all bits posterior probability via several
iteration as the input of hard decision model.

(3)

P(bi , m  1)

 log

N0

In this formula,  m0 and  m1 are symbol sets when

m-th bit is 0 or 1 respectively. Sl , m represents m-th bit

P(bi , m  1)

t
sl  m

 | yk ,i  hk ,i sl |2

log 2 M
Lqk 1 (bi , n ) 

s
 qk (bi , m )  max0  k ,i ,l 
(1) l , n

sl  m
2
n 1, n  m

 (4)
q 1
log
M
2
Lk (bi , n ) 

s
 max1  k ,i ,l 
(1) l , n

sl  m
2
n 1, n  m



In order to improve the performance of maximum

likelihood ration judgment in base station, this scheme
uses serial iterative receiver as shown in figure 7. In the
process of iteration, extrinsic information is transferred
among demodulator, posteriori probability decoder and
soft information combination. In this scheme,
demodulation and decoding process are accomplished in
one module named differential demodulator. We use
M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation(M-QAM) to
modulate the encoded information. Each transit node in
base station uses ideal channel state information (CSI).
M-ary signal vector set is marked as . is total number
of signals that base station receives from transit nodes.
In the th iteration, demodulator
calculates extrinsic
information logarithmic likelihood ratios (LLRS) of
which represents th bit of th symbol that receiver
receives. Based on reference [7]-[8], we can get:
P(bi , m  1| yk ,i )

exp(

Simplify the calculation of LLR as follows:

3 Iterative Demodulation and Decoding

Process

 qk (bi , m )  log

tm 

 Lqk 1 (bi , m )

Here, k  U1 ,U 2 , R ; m  1,2,...,log 2 M ; i  1, 2,..., N ,



Proceedings of ICCT2013

convolution channel coding and 16QAM modulation,

MSP mapping is superior to the traditional gray mapping.
In this section, we compare the performance of scheme
using joint encoding differential modulation under gray
mapping and the performance of scheme using joint
encoding non-differential modulation under MSP
mapping. These two schemes adopt convolution channel
coding. As shown in figure 9, abscissa is signal to noise
ratio ( ) of direct link, and ordinate is bit error rate
(BER). We can see in figure 9 that no matter whether to
adopt iteration, the performance of the former scheme is
obviously better than the latter. Now we discuss the
situation of five iterations. At low signal-to-noise ratio
(<2dB), the both schemes have comparable performance.

Simulation Results

In this section, the simulation results of BICM-ID

scheme using joint encoding differential modulation in
terms of AWGN channel will be showed. As mentioned
before, simulation is aiming at convolution channel
coding and 16QAM differential modulation in this
paper.
When adopting gray mapping, the performance
comparison of BICM-ID scheme using joint encoding
differential modulation and that using joint encoding
non-differential modulation is shown in figure 8.

Figure 8 Convolution channel coding, K=1920,

comparison of scheme using DE-16QAM and that using
16QAM, AWGN

Figure 9 Convolution channel coding, K=1920,

comparison of scheme using DE-16QAM under gray
mapping and that using 16QAM under MSP mapping,

Abscissa is signal to noise ratio ( Eb / N0 ) of direct link.

Ordinate is bit error rate (BER). In this simulation, we
assume that the relay links Eb / N0 is same as the
direct links. The relay link means link between relay
and base station and the direct link means link between
users and base station.

At high signal-to-noise ratio (>2dB), the former scheme

obtains 2.3 dB gain in comparison with the latter.

In order to further improve the performance of uplink of

MARC after it adopting network coding technology, a
BICM-ID scheme based on joint encoding differential
modulation is proposed in this paper, and this scheme
adopts convolution channel coding and 16QAM
differential modulation of gray mapping. The authors do
the corresponding simulation, and its result indicates that
the proposed scheme indeed further improve the
reliability of uplink of MARC. It obtains obvious gain in
comparison with the schemes using joint encoding
non-differential modulation of gray mapping and MSP
mapping. Therefore, the proposed scheme in this paper
is valuable.

In figure 8, the conclusion can be got that the BICM-ID

scheme obtains obvious gain. In the scheme using joint
encoding non-differential modulation, the increase of the
number of iterations almost cannot bring the
performance gain. However in the scheme using joint
encoding differential modulation, the increase of the
number of iterations can get obvious gain. For example,
when BER is 1E-4, the scheme of five iterations wins
more than 3dB performance gain in comparison with
that of zero iteration. At low signal-to-noise ratio, the
BER of the scheme using joint encoding differential
modulation is higher than that of the scheme using joint
encoding non-differential modulation. But at high
signal-to-noise ratio (>3dB), the performance of the
former scheme is obviously better than the latter. For
instance, when BER is 1E-4, the former scheme gets 2.3
dB gain in comparison with the latter.

Conclusions

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (61171101) and the National Science and
Technology Major Project (2012ZX03003011) of P.R.China.

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