Performance-complexity tradeoffs achievable by multilevel coding and bit-interleaved coded-modulation in a 64-QAM concatenated coded-modulation system are compared. State-of-the-art optimization strategies are used to determine Pareto frontiers between performance and decoding-complexity. Results show the multilevel coding schemes dominate the bit-interleaved coded-modulation achieving 13.7 dB NCG with reasonable complexity.
