  A new variant of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is proposed. In the
new scheme, called Parallel BICM, L identical binary codes are used in parallel
using a mapper, a newly proposed finite-length interleaver and a binary dither
signal. As opposed to previous approaches, the scheme does not rely on any
assumptions of an ideal, infinite-length interleaver. Over a memoryless
channel, the new scheme is proven to be equivalent to a binary memoryless
channel. Therefore the scheme enables one to easily design coded modulation
schemes using a simple binary code that was designed for that binary channel.
The overall performance of the coded modulation scheme is analytically
evaluated based on the performance of the binary code over the binary channel.
The new scheme is analyzed from an information theoretic viewpoint, where the
capacity, error exponent and channel dispersion are considered. The capacity of
the scheme is identical to the BICM capacity. The error exponent of the scheme
is numerically compared to a recently proposed mismatched-decoding exponent
analysis of BICM.
