Advanced Coding Techniques with Applications to Storage Systems

This dissertation considers several coding techniques based on Reed-Solomon (RS) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These two prominent families of error-correcting codes have attracted a great amount of interest from both theorists and practitioners and have been applied in many communication scenarios. In particular, data storage systems have greatly benefited from these codes in improving the reliability of the storage media. The first part of this dissertation presents a unified framework based on rate-distortion (RD) theory to analyze and optimize multiple decoding trials of RS codes. Finding the best set of candidate decoding patterns is shown to be equivalent to a covering problem which can be solved asymptotically by RD theory. The proposed approach helps understand the asymptotic performance-versus-complexity trade-off of these multiple-attempt decoding algorithms and can be applied to a wide range of decoders and error models. In the second part, we consider spatially-coupled (SC) codes, or terminated LDPC convolutional codes, over intersymbol-interference (ISI) channels under joint iterative decoding. We empirically observe the phenomenon of threshold saturation whereby the belief-propagation (BP) threshold of the SC ensemble is improved to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of the underlying ensemble. More specifically, we derive a generalized extrinsic information transfer (GEXIT) curve for the joint decoder that naturally obeys the area theorem and estimate the MAP and BP thresholds. We also conjecture that SC codes due to threshold saturation can universally approach the symmetric information rate of ISI channels. In the third part, a similar analysis is used to analyze the MAP thresholds of LDPC codes for several multiuser systems, namely a noisy Slepian-Wolf problem and a multiple access channel with erasures. We provide rigorous analysis and derive upper bounds on the MAP thresholds which are shown to be tight in some cases. This analysis is a first step towards proving threshold saturation for these systems which would imply SC codes with joint BP decoding can universally approach the entire capacity region of the corresponding systems

Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) Modulation for Wireless Communications

The orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is a recently proposed multi-carrier transmission scheme, which innovatively multiplexes the information symbols in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain instead of the conventional time-frequency (TF) domain. The DD domain symbol multiplexing gives rise to a direct interaction between the DD domain information symbols and DD domain channel responses, which are usually quasi-static, compact, separable, and potentially sparse. Therefore, OTFS modulation enjoys appealing advantages over the conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation for wireless communications. In this thesis, we investigate the related subjects of OTFS modulation for wireless communications, specifically focusing on its signal detection, performance analysis, and applications. In specific, we first offer a literature review on the OTFS modulation in Chapter~1. Furthermore, a summary of wireless channels is given in Chapter 2. In particular, we discuss the characteristics of wireless channels in different domains and compare their properties. In Chapter 3, we present a detailed derivation of the OTFS concept based on the theory of Zak transform (ZT) and discrete Zak transform (DZT). We unveil the connections between OTFS modulation and DZT, where the DD domain interpretations of key components for modulation, such as pulse shaping, and matched-filtering, are highlighted. The main research contributions of this thesis appear in Chapter 4 to Chapter 7. In Chapter 4, we introduce the hybrid maximum a posteriori (MAP) and parallel interference cancellation (PIC) detection. This detection approach exploits the power discrepancy among different resolvable paths and can obtain near-optimal error performance with a reduced complexity. In Chapter 5, we propose the cross domain iterative detection for OTFS modulation by leveraging the unitary transformations among different domains. After presenting the key concepts of the cross domain iterative detection, we study its performance via state evolution. We show that the cross domain iterative detection can approach the optimal error performance theoretically. Our numerical results agree with our theoretical analysis and demonstrate a significant performance improvement compared to conventional OTFS detection methods. In Chapter 6, we investigate the error performance for coded OTFS systems based on the pairwise-error probability (PEP) analysis. We show that there exists a fundamental trade-off between the coding gain and the diversity gain for coded OTFS systems. According to this trade-off, we further provide some rule-of-thumb guidelines for code design in OTFS systems. In Chapter 7, we study the potential of OTFS modulation in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) transmissions. We propose the concept of spatial-spreading to facilitate the ISAC design, which is able to discretize the angular domain, resulting in simple and insightful input-output relationships for both radar sensing and communication. Based on spatial-spreading, we verify the effectiveness of OTFS modulation in ISAC transmissions and demonstrate the performance improvements in comparison to the OFDM counterpart. A summary of this thesis is presented in Chapter 8, where we also discuss some potential research directions on OTFS modulation. The concept of OTFS modulation and the elegant theory of DD domain communication may have opened a new gate for the development of wireless communications, which is worthy to be further explored