Patent · US Expired

Block coding scheme for fractional-bit transmission

US5113401A · kind A · utility

19Cited by
9References
11Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateAug 30, 1989
Grant dateMay 12, 1992
Priority date
Expiry dateAug 30, 2009

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04L27/3477
  • WIPO fieldDigital communication
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

In a trellis-coded modulation (TCM) transmission system, data bits are grouped into bit blocks (13), and each such bit block is encoded to select a fixed number w of symbols from a given symbol set (14). The symbols are subdivided into subsets, and each subset includes a few outer symbols and a greater number of inner symbols. Each symbol represents one particular transmission signal value. A first portion (17) of each bit block is separated into w bit subgroups, each of which is separately expanded by a convolutional encoder (20) to obtain a bit combination (19, 15) for specifying one of the symbol subsets. The remaining portion (21) of each bit block is expanded by a block coder (22) to obtain w bit subgroups (23), each being a bit combination (25, 16) for selecting one particular symbol out of a specified subset; outer symbols are selected less frequently than inner symbols. The arrangement allows to transmit a non-integer number of data bits per symbol, and further allows to operate with single-symbol TCM.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.