Implementation of a High Throughput 3GPP Turbo Decoder on GPU

Turbo code is a computationally intensive channel code that is widely used in current and upcoming wireless standards. General-purpose graphics processor unit (GPGPU) is a programmable commodity processor that achieves high performance computation power by using many simple cores. In this paper, we present a 3GPP LTE compliant Turbo decoder accelerator that takes advantage of the processing power of GPU to offer fast Turbo decoding throughput. Several techniques are used to improve the performance of the decoder. To fully utilize the computational resources on GPU, our decoder can decode multiple codewords simultaneously, divide the workload for a single codeword across multiple cores, and pack multiple codewords to fit the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction width. In addition, we use shared memory judiciously to enable hundreds of concurrent multiple threads while keeping frequently used data local to keep memory access fast. To improve efficiency of the decoder in the high SNR regime, we also present a low complexity early termination scheme based on average extrinsic LLR statistics. Finally, we examine how different workload partitioning choices affect the error correction performance and the decoder throughput.Renesas MobileTexas InstrumentsXilinxNational Science Foundatio

Near-Capacity Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation Design

Bandwidth efficient parallel-concatenated Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation (TTCM) schemes were designed for communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. A symbol-based union bound was derived for analysing the error floor of the proposed TTCM schemes. A pair of In-phase (I) and Quadrature-phase (Q) interleavers were employed for interleaving the I and Q components of the TTCM coded symbols, in order to attain an increased diversity gain. The decoding convergence of the IQ-TTCM schemes was analysed using symbol based EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. The best TTCM component codes were selected with the aid of both the symbol-based union bound and non-binary EXIT charts for the sake of designing capacity-approaching IQ-TTCM schemes in the context of 8PSK, 16QAM and 32QAM signal sets. It will be shown that our TTCM design is capable of approaching the channel capacity within 0.5 dB at a throughput of 4 bit/s/Hz, when communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels using 32QAM

Implementation of Turbo Code with Early Iteration Termination in GNU Radio

Wireless communication systems demand energy efficient and performance optimized error correction scheme. Turbo code, an iterative error correction code, shows strong error correction capability. Many wireless communication systems use Turbo code in their standards due to its near ideal performance. The iterative nature of Turbo decoder introduces additional computations, decoding delay, and power consumption. The number of iterations required to obtain the desired output varies with the channel conditions. Early iteration termination at appropriate time reduces the computational complexity without performance degradation. An early iteration termination based on the absolute value of the mean of extrinsic information has been proposed recently. This technique efficiently terminates the iteration at low and high SNR conditions and also minimizes the half iterations. Software Defined Radio (SDR), a communication system technology, is a common platform that supports various standards. GNU Radio is the software part of SDR that allows implementing various features of communication systems. A low complex Turbo decoder in GNU Radio along with Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) helps to implement real time applications with low decoding delay and reduced complexity. In this paper, Turbo CODEC with early iteration termination has been implemented in GNU Radio platform

Efficient systematic turbo polar decoding based on optimized scaling factor and early termination mechanism

In this paper, an efficient early termination (ET) mechanism for systematic turbo-polar code (STPC) based on optimal estimation of scaling factor (SF) is proposed. The gradient of the regression line which best fits the distance between a priori and extrinsic information is used to estimate the SF. The multiplication of the extrinsic information by the proposed SF presents effectiveness in resolving the correlation issue between intrinsic and extrinsic reliability information traded between the two typical parallel concatenated soft-cancellation (SCAN) decoders. It is shown that the SF has improved the conventional STPC by about 0.3 dB with an interleaver length of 64 bits, and about 1 dB over the systematic polar code (SPC) at a bit error rate (BER) of . A new scheme is proposed as a stopping criterion, which is mainly based on the estimated value of SF at the second component decoder and the decoded frozen bits for each decoding iteration. It is shown that the proposed ET results in halving the average number of iterations (ANI) without adding considerable complexity. Moreover, the modified codes present comparable results in terms of BER to the codes that utilize fix number of iterations

Decoding of Decode and Forward (DF) Relay Protocol using Min-Sum Based Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) System

Decoding high complexity is a major issue to design a decode and forward (DF) relay protocol. Thus, the establishment of low complexity decoding system would beneficial to assist decode and forward relay protocol. This paper reviews existing methods for the min-sum based LDPC decoding system as the low complexity decoding system. Reference lists of chosen articles were further reviewed for associated publications. This paper introduces comprehensive system model representing and describing the methods developed for LDPC based for DF relay protocol. It is consists of a number of components: (1) encoder and modulation at the source node, (2) demodulation, decoding, encoding and modulation at relay node, and (3) demodulation and decoding at the destination node. This paper also proposes a new taxonomy for min-sum based LDPC decoding techniques, highlights some of the most important components such as data used, result performances and profiles the Variable and Check Node (VCN) operation methods that have the potential to be used in DF relay protocol. Min-sum based LDPC decoding methods have the potential to provide an objective measure the best tradeoff between low complexities decoding process and the decoding error performance, and emerge as a cost-effective solution for practical application

Windowed Decoding of Protograph-based LDPC Convolutional Codes over Erasure Channels

We consider a windowed decoding scheme for LDPC convolutional codes that is based on the belief-propagation (BP) algorithm. We discuss the advantages of this decoding scheme and identify certain characteristics of LDPC convolutional code ensembles that exhibit good performance with the windowed decoder. We will consider the performance of these ensembles and codes over erasure channels with and without memory. We show that the structure of LDPC convolutional code ensembles is suitable to obtain performance close to the theoretical limits over the memoryless erasure channel, both for the BP decoder and windowed decoding. However, the same structure imposes limitations on the performance over erasure channels with memory.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor