A method and apparatus to adaptively puncture bits within QAM modulated data
symbols
transmitted in a communication system in order to effect a signaling channel. The
method and apparatus utilize inherent characteristics of a particular mapping scheme
for the QAM constellation to selectively puncture particular bits within a data
symbol with signaling information and predetermined binary values to selectively
increase the log-likelihood ratio gains of those particular bits punctured with
the signaling information. The log-likelihood ratios are used to obtain the signaling
information and, thus, increasing the gain of the log-likelihood ratios affords
greater reliability for the signaling information without increasing the required
system resources.
