  The pragmatic approach to coded continuous-phase modulation (CPM) is proposed
as a capacity-achieving low-complexity alternative to the serially-concatenated
CPM (SC-CPM) coding scheme. In this paper, we first perform a selection of the
best spectrally-efficient CPM modulations to be embedded into SC-CPM schemes.
Then, we consider the pragmatic capacity (a.k.a. BICM capacity) of CPM
modulations and optimize it through a careful design of the mapping between
input bits and CPM waveforms. The so obtained schemes are cascaded with an
outer serially-concatenated convolutional code to form a pragmatic
coded-modulation system. The resulting schemes exhibit performance very close
to the CPM capacity without requiring iterations between the outer decoder and
the CPM demodulator. As a result, the receiver exhibits reduced complexity and
increased flexibility due to the separation of the demodulation and decoding
functions.
