Rotationally invariant and rotationally robust codes for the AWGN and the noncoherent channel

The paper investigates the design and robustness of rotationally invariant (RI) codes. First, RI codes are extended to the case of serially concatenated (SC) trellis-coded modulation (TCM) and several high-rate powerful RI-SCTCM codes are designed over 8-phase-shift keying and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation alphabets. The investigation continues by considering more realistic channels that introduce cycle slips during phase estimation, and thus rotate only part of the transmitted codeword. It is proven that RI codes with small state space are robust in these channels, even when traditional coherent decoders are utilized. Furthermore, it is demonstrated through simulations that the addition of a simple stopping criterion to the coherent iterative decoding algorithm is sufficient for robustness of the more powerful RI-SCTCM codes when partial codeword rotations are considered. Finally, it is investigated whether RI codes are useful for transmission in the noncoherent channel. It is proved that RI codes are as good as any other good codes for this channel when the phase dynamics are low, and optimal decoding is performed. However, it is shown that for a certain class of receivers, RI codes are also robust to partial phase rotations in this channel.