A Reduced Complexity Decoding Scheme for Trellis Coded Modulation

In this paper, we propose a technique used to simplify the trellis diagram, thus, reduce the complexity of Viterbi decoder in term of the number of Compare-Select (CS) operations needs in decoding process. It is shown that if the branch metrics are properly decomposed into orthogonal components. The trellis diagram can be modified that each original state with large number branches terminating to it can be broken into a number of sub-states having smaller number of branches terminating to them. Simulation results shown that the newly proposed technique can be used reduced the complexity of 8 and 16 PSK-TCMs without degrading the BER performance.