Serial concatenated trellis coded modulation with rate-1 inner code

We develop new, low complexity turbo codes suitable for bandwidth and power limited systems, for very low bit and word error rate requirements. Motivated by the structure of previously discovered low complexity codes such as repeat-accumulate (RA) codes with low density parity check matrix, we extend the structure to high-level modulation such as 8PSK, and 16QAM. The structure consists of a simple 4-state convolutional or short block code as an outer code, and a rate-1, 2 or 4-state inner code. Two design criteria are proposed: the maximum likelihood design criterion, for short to moderate block sizes, and an iterative decoding design criterion for very long block sizes.