Franco Chiaraluce

Marco Chiani

Roberto Garello

Journal of Communications Software and Systems

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JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2006 177Guest EditorialChannel Coding in Wireless SystemsI t is our pleasure to introduce this Special Issue on”Channel Coding in Wireless Systems” of the Journalof Communication Software and Systems (JCOMSS).This is one of the initiatives conceived to promote JCOMSS, arelatively new journal born from an idea of the Croatian Com-munication and Information Society (CCIS) and the Universityof Split, and endorsed by the IEEE Technical Committeeon Communications Software of the IEEE CommunicationsSociety.Really, the Croatian group is very active in supporting IEEEactivities and proposing original ideas for exchanging experi-ences and results among researchers coming from universities,industries and research centers. Just to mention an exam-ple, it is the main organizer of SoftCOM, the InternationalConference on Software, Telecommunications and ComputerNetworks, that is probably the only ICT workshop in the worldto be held aboard a ship, cruising along the Croatian andthe Italian coasts. This year SoftCOM will celebrate its 14thedition.Then, charmed from so much dynamism, when Prof. NikolaRozic asked for us to organize a special issue on the the-oretical and practical aspects of channel coding for wirelessapplications, we accepted the invitation with great enthusiasm.Wireless systems are a privileged field to discuss the advan-tages of channel coding in telecommunications. The wirelesschannel is a particularly severe test-bed: it is affected bynonlinearities, multipaths, Doppler shifts, fading, shadowing,interference from other users, and many other impairments de-picting an involved scenario, difficult to treat but also excitingfor proposing new and attractive solutions. The invention ofturbo codes in 1993 has been followed by the application ofiterative techniques to many other blocks of communicationsystems, and the rapid implementation of these concepts inpractical applications. In the last ten years new schemes havebeen designed (and old ones reinterpreted) able to approachShannon capacity limits with reasonable complexity. Thisway, new applications and services become possible, quiteunthinkable in the past.Our goal was to realize a special issue representing a usefulstarting point for young researchers and PhD students inter-ested in modern channel coding. For this reason we invitedsome universally recognized experts to write a semi-tutorialpaper describing the state-of-the-art, the recent evolution, andthe main open issues for three key coding subjects: ClaudeBerrou (turbo codes), Bill Ryan and Shu Lin (LDPC), andGiuseppe Caire (space-time codes). We are really indebtedwith them because, as the reader will find, they have writtenthree excellent papers, containing both a perfect compendiumon their subject and new important results.So, it is an honor to start the volume with a paper by ClaudeBerrou, the inventor of turbo-codes and the main responsiblefor the coding revolution. In his paper ”Turbo codes and turboalgorithms”, co-authored by Charlotte Lanlglais and Yi Yu,Prof Berrou provides a clear and explicit discussion of theturbo principle and demonstrates the importance to have abi-directional message passing for approaching almost idealperformance. He also introduces for the first time the novelconcept of genie-initialized iterative processing (GIIP) as atool to assess the error performance of iterative processing.Finally, he applies the new method to two examples ofrelevant importance for wireless systems, that is Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Linear Precoding.The second invited paper, entitled ”Design of LDPC codes:a survey and new results”, has been written by Bill Ryan, ShuLin, Gianluigi Liva, Shumei Song, Lan Lan and Yifei Zhang.It provides an excellent survey of the design techniques usedfor these codes, with special emphasis on those yielding cyclicand quasi-cyclic codes, because of the benefits they offer interms of reduced encoding complexity and decoding efficiency.Several algebraic constructions are considered and rather newconcepts, like that of protographs or Reed-Solomon basedLDPC codes, are highlighted and their features discussed.Moreover, the paper includes a number of performance resultsand codes structures not yet presented elsewhere.The third paper ”Space-time coding: an overview”, writtenby Giuseppe Caire, Petros Elias and K. Raj Kumar, dealswith space-time codes and their natural application in wire-less systems, where they improve performance of diversitytechniques based on multiple antennas. The paper gives acomprehensive overview of the fundamental aspects in space-time coding, starting from classic information theoretic resultson multiple-input multiple-output fading channels and thendiscussing the fundamental issue of optimal codes design. Inparticular, they review a number of constructions that permit toachieve the so-called optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff,justifying the approach by means of an original theory throughwhich the authors have been able to recently extend the designprocedures of these codes.The special issue is completed by 4 regular papers, selectedafter international review process. They discuss different as-pects of channel coding in wireless system, all relevant fromthe theoretical or practical point of view.In ”Turbo codes performance optimization over block fadingchannels”, Fulvio Babich, Guido Montorsi and Francesca Vattafind the best adaptation of a turbo code to a block fadingchannel. Code adaptation is achieved through the insertion ofan interleaver, following the turbo encoder, that spreads thesymbols on different subchannels, thus providing an amount ofdiversity. By rigorous arguments from the information theory,they are able to find the nearly best achievable performance of178 JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2006a turbo code over a block fading channel, that is a remarkableresult for wireless applications.In ”Some extended results on the design of punctured seriallyconcatenated convolutional codes”, Massimiliano Laddomadaand Bartolo Scanavino show the results of an exhaustive searchfor optimum constituent encoders and puncturing patterns toapply in this class of codes. Either the waterfall region or theerror floor region, are taken into account in the analysis, thattherefore provides very general design tools.Roberto H. Morelos-Zaragoza has written ”On the errorperformance of coding and equalization in low-complexityultra-wideband communication systems”, where he analyzespulse-based ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systemsfor applications in short-range indoor environments. On thesesystems, various channel coding schemes are applied andcompared, also including decision feedback equalization. Thepaper highlights, among the others, the class of Turbo ProductCodes (TPCs), as they offer the best tradeoff between errorperformance and decoding complexity for the consideredapplication and the bit error rates of interest.Finally, Maurizio Martina, Andrea Molino, Fabrizio Vacca,Guido Masera and Guido Montorsi, in the paper entitled ”Highthroughput implementation of an adaptive serial concatenationturbo decoder”, face the fundamental problem of practicalimplementation of a turbo encoder/decoder incorporating therelevant, and difficult to meet, issues of high data rates andflexibility. The authors give exhaustive implementation details,proving feasibility in a commercial single Field ProgrammableGate Array (FPGA) device, with very high throughput andlimited percentage device occupation, taking benefits, for thispurpose, by highly regular and parallel structures. At the endof this introduction, thanks to the value of the authors and theimportance of the subjects discussed, we hope to have beenable to prepare a good special issue, useful for channel codingresearchers. If this will be, the major merits, of course, shallbe attributed to the authors themselves, and for this reason wewish to thank all of them once again.31. August 2006MARCO CHIANIUniversita di BolognaItalyFRANCO CHIARALUCEUniversita Politecnica delle MarcheAncona, ItalyROBERTO GARELLOPolitecnico di TorinoItalyMarco Chiani was born in Rimini, Italy, in April1964. He received the Dr. Ing. degree (magnacum laude)in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D.degree in Electronic and Computer Science fromthe University of Bologna in 1989 and 1993, re-spectively. Dr. Chiani is a Full Professor at the IIEngineering Faculty, University of Bologna, Italy,where he is the Chair in Telecommunication. Duringthe summer of 2001 he was a Visiting Scientist atAT&T Research Laboratories in Middletown, NJ. Heis a frequent visitor at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT), where he presently holds a Research Affiliate appoint-ment.Dr. Chiani’s research interests include wireless communication systems,MIMO systems, wireless multimedia, low density parity check codes (LD-PCC) and UWB. Under the European research program PROMETHEUShe has worked on short-range millimeter wave communication systems forAdvanced Road Transport Telematics. He is also leading the research unit ofCNIT/University of Bologna on Joint Source and Channel Coding for wirelessvideo (IST FP6, project Phoenix) and is a consultant to the European SpaceAgency (ESA-ESOC) for the design and evaluation of error correcting codesbased on LDPCC for space CCSDS applications. Prof. Chiani has been aconsultant for several other telecommunications industries and operators, andengages in active collaboration with many research centers and universities,such as MIT, NASA/JPL, VTT, Thales, Philips, Telecom New Zealand, theUniversity of Canterbury, and the University of Arizona.Dr. Chiani is actively involved in various communications research activitiesworldwide. He is the past chair (2002-2004) of the Radio CommunicationsCommittee of the IEEE Communication Society and the current Editor ofWireless Communication for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. Dr.Chiani has chaired, organized sessions and served on the Technical ProgramCommittees at several IEEE International Conferences. He was Co-Chair ofthe Wireless Communications Symposium at ICC 2004. In January 2006 hereceived the ICNEWS award ”For Fundamental Contributions to the Theoryand Practice of Wireless Communications”.Franco Chiaraluce was born in Ancona, Italy, in1960. He received the ”Laurea in Ingegneria Elet-tronica” (summa cum laude) from the Universitá diAncona in 1985. Since 1987 he joined the Dipar-timento di Elettronica ed Automatica of the sameuniversity. At present, he is an Associate Professorat the Universitá Politecnica delle Marche. His mainresearch interests involve various aspects of commu-nication systems theory and design, with special em-phasis on coding, cryptography and multiple accesstechniques. In the specific field of error correctingcodes he co-operates with national and international telecommunicationscompanies, and has been also involved in activities with the European SpaceAgency (ESA), under the framework of joint researches or contracts. He isco-author of more than 170 papers and two books. He is member of IEEEand IEICE.Roberto Garello was born in Torino, Italy, on De-cember 18, 1965. He received the ”Laurea ”; degree(summa cum laude) in 1989 and the ”Dottorato diRicerca” degree in electronic engineering in 1994,both from Politecnico di Torino. During 1993, hespent six months visiting the Laboratory for In-formation and Decision Systems, the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, and theSignal and Information Processing Laboratory, ETH,Zurich. From October 1994 to September 1997, hewas a Design Engineer at the Radio Link Labora-tory of Marconi Communications, Genova, working on high-rate all-digitalmodems and error-control scheme design. From November 1998 to October2001 he was an Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica edAutomatica of University agrave; di Ancona, Italy. Since November 2001 heis an Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica of Politecnico diTorino, where he currently serves as coordinator of the TelecommunicationEngineering degree. Senior member of IEEE, his main research interests arecoding theory and genomic signal processing.

Channel Coding in Wireless Systems

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Channel Coding in Wireless Systems

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