AbstractRecently, using iterative decoding algorithms to achieve an interesting bit error rate for spectrally efficient modulation become a necessity for optical transmission, in this paper, we propose a coded modulation scheme based on bit interleaving circular recursive systematic convolutional (CRSC) code and 16-QAM modulation. The proposal system considered as a serial concatenation of a channel encoder, a bit interleaver and M-ary modulator can be flexible easy to implement using a short code length. For a spectral efficiency $\eta =3\text{bit}/s/Hz$, the coding gain at a bit error rate of 10−6 is about 8 dB.