Multirate trellis coded modulation in multimedia communications

Multirate multimedia information with different quality of service may be required at the same time in furture communication system. In this paper, we propose a new class of trellis coded modulation (TCM) schemes, which can carry two different rates multimedia information only using the same signal constellation. The transmitted information bit number per symbol in the proposed TCM is not a integer and greater than that of the conventional TCM. An interesting character of the proposed multirate TCM is that it can provide different error protection for the two rates information. We also present the design criteria and the existences of noncatastrophic multirate TCM. Some simulation results have shown that it can provide a certain coding gain compared with the corresponding uncoded modualtion schemes.