Patent ID: 8077790

Claim:
A method of trellis encoding, comprising: processing a first set of input bits using a first trellis encoder to generate a first set of coded bits that correspond to a particular building-block signal point of a coded-constellation-building block, wherein the coded-constellation-building block comprises a plurality of building-block signal points; processing a second set of input bits using a second trellis encoder to generate a second set of coded bits that correspond to a tiling point of a tiling constellation; jointly mapping the first and second sets of coded bits onto a transmission signal point, wherein the jointly mapping is performed in such a way that when each admissible combination of the first set of coded bits corresponding to a respective one of the plurality of building-block signal points is jointly mapped with the second set of coded bits, each such respective jointly mapped transmission signal point is located closer to the tiling point than any second tiling point in the tiling constellation.