  We study the performance of binary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check
codes (SC-LDPC) when used with bit-interleaved coded-modulation (BICM) schemes.
This paper considers the cases when transmission takes place over additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN)channels and Rayleigh fast-fading channels. The
technique of upper bounding the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) decoding performance
of LDPC codes using an area theorem is extended for BICM schemes. The upper
bound is computed for both the optimal MAP demapper and the suboptimal
max-log-MAP (MLM) demapper. It is observed that this bound approaches the noise
threshold of BICM channels for regular LDPC codes with large degrees. The rest
of the paper extends these techniques to SC-LDPC codes and the phenomenon of
threshold saturation is demonstrated numerically. Based on numerical evidence,
we conjecture that the belief-propagation (BP) decoding threshold of SC-LDPC
codes approaches the MAP decoding threshold of the underlying LDPC ensemble on
BICM channels. Numerical results also show that SC-LDPC codes approach the BICM
capacity over different channels and modulation schemes.
