The purpose of this paper is to compare bit and symbol interleaving in turbo-equalization (TE) schemes. Considering a single binary encoder and memoryless mapper, the corresponding transmission schemes are respectively bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and trellis-coded modulation (TCM) over a static frequency selective channel. Appropriate turbo processing at the receiver is ensured in both cases. For the sake of tractability, efficient low-complexity MMSE-based implementations are proposed. The asymptotic performance of the resulting bit- and symbol-interleaved TE schemes is then linked with that of the underlying coded modulation schemes. As an extension to [X. Li, J. Ritcey, 1999], this enables to show that bit-interleaved TE with carefully chosen constellation mapping and proper implementation can outperform its symbol-interleaved counterpart.
Dejonghe, A., & Vandendorpe, L. (2003). A comparison of bit and symbol interleaving in MMSE turbo-equalization. 2003 IEEE International Conference on Communications (Cat. No.03CH37441), Vol. 4, p. 2928-2932. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/230655