  Two decoder structures for coded modulation over the Gaussian and flat fading
channels are studied: the maximum likelihood symbol-wise decoder, and the
(suboptimal) bit-wise decoder based on the bit-interleaved coded modulation
paradigm. We consider a 16-ary quadrature amplitude constellation labeled by a
Gray labeling. It is shown that the asymptotic loss in terms of pairwise error
probability, for any two codewords caused by the bit-wise decoder, is bounded
by 1.25 dB. The analysis also shows that for the Gaussian channel the
asymptotic loss is zero for a wide range of linear codes, including all
rate-1/2 convolutional codes.
