Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM)
Trellis coded modulation (TCM)
is a modulation scheme which allows highly efficient transmission of information over band-limited channels such as telephone lines. Trellis modulation was invented by Gottfried Ungerboeck working for IBM in the 1970s, and first described in a conference paper in 1976; but it went largely unnoticed until he published a new detailed exposition in 1982 which achieved sudden widespread recognition.
Concept of Trellis Coded Modulation
Trellis Code Modulation is one of the coded modulation techniques used in digital communications. It combines the choice of a modulation scheme with that of a convolutional code together for the purpose of gaining noise immunity over uncoded transmission without expanding the signal bandwidth or increasing the transmitted power. Trellis Coded Modulation, or TCM, was invented as a method to improve the reliability of a digital transmission system without bandwidth expansion or reduction of data rate. Normal channel codes such as block and convolutional codes improve the performances of the communication system by expanding the bandwidth. The Euclidean distance between the transmitted coded waveforms would be increased by the use of coding, but at the price of increasing the bandwidth. Trellis coded modulation is a coded modulation scheme that can increase the noise immunity and simultaneously do not increase the bandwidth. Therefore, Trellis Coded Modulation is suitable for band-limited channels. [nemesis.lonestar.org] Trellis Coded Modulation is an enhancement of QAM, which adds a large number of redundant bits to each Symbol, a technique known as Forward Correction. The result is that a given Symbol has more invalid than valid bit combinations, and this means that bit errors have a higher probability of being detected at the transmission level. In TCM, the receiver uses the extra data from the revious Symbol to check the accuracy of the current Symbol. Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) is used widely in high-speed voice-band modems. Without coding, high-speed modems achieved data rate up to 9600 bits/sec with M = 16 QAM signal constellation. The added coding gain provided by Trellis Coded Modulation has made it possible to increase the speed of the transmission by at least a factor of 2. For example, the ITU V.34 family TCM modem recommendations supports data bit rate as high as 33.6 kb/sec.
Trellis diagram
A convolutional encoder is a finite state machine. An encoder with n binary cells will have 2n states.Imagine that the encoder (shown on Img.1, above) has '1' in the left memory cell (m0), and '0' in the right one (m-1). (m1 is not really a memory cell because it represents a current value). We will designate such a state as "10". According to an input bit the encoder at the next turn can convert either to the "01" state or the "11" state. One can see that not all transitions are possible (e.g., a decoder can't convert from "10" state to "00" or even stay in "10" state).
All possible transitions can be shown as below:
A path through the trellis is shown as a red line. The solid lines indicate transitions where a "0" is input and the dashed lines where a "1" is input.
An actual encoded sequence can be represented as a path on this graph. One valid path is shown in red as an example.
This diagram gives us an idea about decoding: if a received sequence doesn't fit this graph, then it was received with errors, and we must choose the nearest correct (fitting the graph) sequence. The real decoding algorithms exploit this idea.
Free distance and error distribution
The free distance (d) is the minimal Hamming distance between different encoded sequences. The correcting capability(t) of a convolutional code is the number of errors that can be corrected by the code. It can be calculated as
Since a convolutional code doesn't use blocks, processing instead a continuous bitstream, the value of t applies to a quantity of errors located relatively near to each other. That is, multiple groups of t errors can usually be fixed when they are relatively far apart.
Free distance can be interpreted as the minimal length of an erroneous "burst" at the output of a convolutional decoder. The fact that errors appear as "bursts" should be accounted for when designing a concatenated code with an inner convolutional code. The popular solution for this problem is to interleave data before convolutional encoding, so that the outer block (usually Reed-Solomon) code can correct most of the errors.
