Turbo-Detected Unequal Error Protection Irregular Convolutional Codes Designed for the Wideband Advanced Multirate Speech Codec

Abstract—since the different bits of multimedia information, such as speech and video, have different error sensitivity, efficient unequalprotection channel coding schemes have to be used to ensure that the perceptually more important bits benefit from more powerful protection. Furthermore, in the context of turbo detection the channel codes should also match the characteristics of the channel for the sake of attaining a good convergence performance. In this paper, we address this design dilemma by using irregular convolutional codes (IRCCs) which constitute a family of different-rate subcodes. we benefit from the high design flexibility of IRCCs and hence excellent convergence properties are maintained while having unequal error protection capabilities matched to the requirements of the source. An EXIT chart based design procedure is proposed and used in the context of protecting the different-sensitivity speech bits of the wideband AMR speech codec. As a benefit, the unequalprotection system using IRCCs exhibits an SNR advantage of about 0.4dB over the equal-protection system employing regular convolutional codes, when communicating over a Gaussian channel

On the Construction and Decoding of Concatenated Polar Codes

A scheme for concatenating the recently invented polar codes with interleaved block codes is considered. By concatenating binary polar codes with interleaved Reed-Solomon codes, we prove that the proposed concatenation scheme captures the capacity-achieving property of polar codes, while having a significantly better error-decay rate. We show that for any $\epsilon > 0$, and total frame length $N$, the parameters of the scheme can be set such that the frame error probability is less than $2^{-N^{1-\epsilon}}$, while the scheme is still capacity achieving. This improves upon 2^{-N^{0.5-\eps}}, the frame error probability of Arikan's polar codes. We also propose decoding algorithms for concatenated polar codes, which significantly improve the error-rate performance at finite block lengths while preserving the low decoding complexity

Successive-relaying-aided decode-and-forward coherent versus noncoherent cooperative multicarrier space–time shift keying

Abstract—Successive-relaying-aided (SR) cooperative multi-carrier (MC) space–time shift keying (STSK) is proposed for frequency-selective channels. We invoke SR to mitigate the typical 50% throughput loss of conventional half-duplex relaying schemes and MC code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) to circumvent the dispersive effects of wireless channels and to reduce the SR-induced interference. The distributed relay terminals form two virtual antenna arrays (VAAs), and the source node (SN) successively transmits frequency-domain (FD) spread signals to one of the VAAs, in addition to directly transmitting to the destination node (DN). The constituent relay nodes (RNs) of each VAA activate cyclic-redundancy-checking-based (CRC) selective decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The DN can jointly detect the signals received via the SN-to-DN and VAA-to-DN links using a low-complexity single-stream-based joint maximum-likelihood (ML) detector. We also propose a differentially encoded cooperative MC-CDMA STSK scheme to facilitate communications over hostile dispersive channels without requiring channel estimation (CE). Dispensing with CE is important since the relays cannot be expected to altruistically estimate the SN-to-RN links for simply supporting the source. Furthermore, we propose soft-decision-aided serially concatenated recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) and unity-rate-coded (URC) cooperative MC STSK and investigate its performance in both coherent and noncoherent scenarios

Successive-relaying-aided decode-and-forward coherent versus noncoherent cooperative multicarrier space–time shift keying

Abstract—Successive-relaying-aided (SR) cooperative multi-carrier (MC) space–time shift keying (STSK) is proposed for frequency-selective channels. We invoke SR to mitigate the typical 50% throughput loss of conventional half-duplex relaying schemes and MC code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) to circumvent the dispersive effects of wireless channels and to reduce the SR-induced interference. The distributed relay terminals form two virtual antenna arrays (VAAs), and the source node (SN) successively transmits frequency-domain (FD) spread signals to one of the VAAs, in addition to directly transmitting to the destination node (DN). The constituent relay nodes (RNs) of each VAA activate cyclic-redundancy-checking-based (CRC) selective decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The DN can jointly detect the signals received via the SN-to-DN and VAA-to-DN links using a low-complexity single-stream-based joint maximum-likelihood (ML) detector. We also propose a differentially encoded cooperative MC-CDMA STSK scheme to facilitate communications over hostile dispersive channels without requiring channel estimation (CE). Dispensing with CE is important since the relays cannot be expected to altruistically estimate the SN-to-RN links for simply supporting the source. Furthermore, we propose soft-decision-aided serially concatenated recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) and unity-rate-coded (URC) cooperative MC STSK and investigate its performance in both coherent and noncoherent scenarios

EXIT charts for system design and analysis

Near-capacity performance may be achieved with the aid of iterative decoding, where extrinsic soft information is exchanged between the constituent decoders in order to improve the attainable system performance. Extrinsic information Transfer (EXIT) charts constitute a powerful semi-analytical tool used for analysing and designing iteratively decoded systems. In this tutorial, we commence by providing a rudimentary overview of the iterative decoding principle and the concept of soft information exchange. We then elaborate on the concept of EXIT charts using three iteratively decoded prototype systems as design examples. We conclude by illustrating further applications of EXIT charts, including near-capacity designs, the concept of irregular codes and the design of modulation schemes

MIMO-aided near-capacity turbo transceivers: taxonomy and performance versus complexity

In this treatise, we firstly review the associated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system theory and review the family of hard-decision and soft-decision based detection algorithms in the context of Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) systems. Our discussions culminate in the introduction of a range of powerful novel MIMO detectors, such as for example Markov Chain assisted Minimum Bit-Error Rate (MC-MBER) detectors, which are capable of reliably operating in the challenging high-importance rank-deficient scenarios, where there are more transmitters than receivers and hence the resultant channel-matrix becomes non-invertible. As a result, conventional detectors would exhibit a high residual error floor. We then invoke the Soft-Input Soft-Output (SISO) MIMO detectors for creating turbo-detected two- or three-stage concatenated SDM schemes and investigate their attainable performance in the light of their computational complexity. Finally, we introduce the powerful design tools of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT)-charts and characterize the achievable performance of the diverse near- capacity SISO detectors with the aid of EXIT charts

Concatenated Turbo/LDPC codes for deep space communications: performance and implementation

Deep space communications require error correction codes able to reach extremely low bit-error-rates, possibly with a steep waterfall region and without error floor. Several schemes have been proposed in the literature to achieve these goals. Most of them rely on the concatenation of different codes that leads to high hardware implementation complexity and poor resource sharing. This work proposes a scheme based on the concatenation of non-custom LDPC and turbo codes that achieves excellent error correction performance. Moreover, since both LDPC and turbo codes can be decoded with the BCJR algorithm, our preliminary results show that an efficient hardware architecture with high resource reuse can be designe