A modified trellis coding technique for partial response channels

The problem of trellis coding for multilevel baseband transmission over partial response channels with transfer polynomials of the form (1+or-D/sup N/) is addressed. The novel method presented here accounts for the channel memory by using multidimensional signal sets and partitioning the signal set present at the noiseless channel output. It is shown that this coding technique can be viewed as a generalization of a well-known procedure for binary signaling: the concatenation of convolutional codes and inner block codes that are tuned to the channel polynomial. It results in high coding gains with moderate complexity if some bandwidth expansion is accepted.