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

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

Low Complexity Noncoherent Iterative Detector for Continuous Phase Modulation Systems

This paper focuses on the noncoherent iterative detection of continuous phase modulation. A class of simplified receivers based on Principal-Component-Analysis (PCA) and Exponential-Window (EW) is developed. The proposed receiver is evaluated in terms of minimum achievable Euclidean distance, simulated bit error rate and achievable capacity. The performance of the proposed receiver is discussed in the context of mismatched receiver and the equivalent Euclidean distance is derived. Analysis and numerical results reveal that the proposed algorithm can approach the coherent performance and outperforms existing algorithm in terms of complexity and performance. It is shown that the proposed receiver can significantly reduce the detection complexity while the performance is comparable with existing algorithms

Self-concatenated code design and its application in power-efficient cooperative communications

In this tutorial, we have focused on the design of binary self-concatenated coding schemes with the help of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts and Union bound analysis. The design methodology of future iteratively decoded self-concatenated aided cooperative communication schemes is presented. In doing so, we will identify the most important milestones in the area of channel coding, concatenated coding schemes and cooperative communication systems till date and suggest future research directions

The Error-Pattern-Correcting Turbo Equalizer

The error-pattern correcting code (EPCC) is incorporated in the design of a turbo equalizer (TE) with aim to correct dominant error events of the inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel at the output of its matching Viterbi detector. By targeting the low Hamming-weight interleaved errors of the outer convolutional code, which are responsible for low Euclidean-weight errors in the Viterbi trellis, the turbo equalizer with an error-pattern correcting code (TE-EPCC) exhibits a much lower bit-error rate (BER) floor compared to the conventional non-precoded TE, especially for high rate applications. A maximum-likelihood upper bound is developed on the BER floor of the TE-EPCC for a generalized two-tap ISI channel, in order to study TE-EPCC's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain for various channel conditions and design parameters. In addition, the SNR gain of the TE-EPCC relative to an existing precoded TE is compared to demonstrate the present TE's superiority for short interleaver lengths and high coding rates.Comment: This work has been submitted to the special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory titled: "Facets of Coding Theory: from Algorithms to Networks". This work was supported in part by the NSF Theoretical Foundation Grant 0728676

Near-capacity iterative decoding of binary self-concatenated codes using soft decision demapping and 3-D EXIT charts

In this paper 3-D Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts are used to design binary Self-Concatenated Convolutional Codes employing Iterative Decoding (SECCC-ID), exchanging extrinsic information with the soft-decision demapper to approach the channel capacity. Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) codes are selected as constituent codes, an interleaver is used for randomising the extrinsic information exchange of the constituent codes, while a puncturer helps to increase the achievable bandwidth efficiency. The convergence behaviour of the decoder is analysed with the aid of bit-based 3-D EXIT charts, for accurately calculating the operating EbN0 threshold, especially when SP based soft demapper is employed. Finally, we propose an attractive system configuration, which is capable of operating within about 1 dB from the channel capacity