Advanced channel coding techniques using bit-level soft information
Abstract
In this dissertation, advanced channel decoding techniques based on bit-level soft information are studied. Two main approaches are proposed: bit-level probabilistic iterative decoding and bit-level algebraic soft-decision (list) decoding (ASD). In the ?rst part of the dissertation, we ?rst study iterative decoding for high density parity check (HDPC) codes. An iterative decoding algorithm, which uses the sum product algorithm (SPA) in conjunction with a binary parity check matrix adapted in each decoding iteration according to the bit-level reliabilities is proposed. In contrast to the common belief that iterative decoding is not suitable for HDPC codes, this bit-level reliability based adaptation procedure is critical to the conver-gence behavior of iterative decoding for HDPC codes and it signi?cantly improves the iterative decoding performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, whose parity check matrices are in general not sparse. We also present another iterative decoding scheme for cyclic codes by randomly shifting the bit-level reliability values in each iteration. The random shift based adaptation can also prevent iterative decoding from getting stuck with a significant complexity reduction compared with the reliability based parity check matrix adaptation and still provides reasonable good performance for short-length cyclic codes. In the second part of the dissertation, we investigate ASD for RS codes using bit-level soft information. In particular, we show that by carefully incorporating bit?level soft information in the multiplicity assignment and the interpolation step, ASD can significantly outperform conventional hard decision decoding (HDD) for RS codes with a very small amount of complexity, even though the kernel of ASD is operating at the symbol-level. More importantly, the performance of the proposed bit-level ASD can be tightly upper bounded for practical high rate RS codes, which is in general not possible for other popular ASD schemes. Bit-level soft-decision decoding (SDD) serves as an e?cient way to exploit the potential gain of many classical codes, and also facilitates the corresponding per-formance analysis. The proposed bit-level SDD schemes are potential and feasible alternatives to conventional symbol-level HDD schemes in many communication sys-tems.