Iterative decoding of serially concatenated convolutional codes over multipath intersymbol-interference channels

Abstract

An iterative decoding approach to joint equalization and decoding for convolutional codes over intersymbol-interference (ISI) channels was previously proposed as the so-called turbo equalization scheme. To increase the coding gain, the use of turbo codes in place of convolutional codes in such a scheme was also investigated. Motivated by the recent result that serially concatenated convolutional codes (SCCC) exhibit a lower error floor than turbo codes in AWGN channels, we investigate here the performance of iterative decoding of SCCC over multipath ISI channels. Using the presented iterative decoding method, our simulation results demonstrate that even in the presence of ISI, the SCCC is superior to the turbo code for low bit error rate (BER) applications.