Refinements and asymptotic performance of bandwidth-efficient turbo product codes

In this letter, a turbo product code (TPC) is combined with multilevel modulations (8-phase-shift keying and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation). The component codes are Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquengem (BCH) or extended BCH. We derive soft-input/soft-output modules based on the dual code, with exact Euclidean metrics, and we show that the iterative TPC decoder gains no advantage in performance from this. Next, we evaluate asymptotic approximations for maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding from a combinatorial approach that can be applied to any bit-interleaved multilevel modulated code, once the first term (or terms) of the Hamming weight spectrum are known. For the TPCs and modulations studied in this letter, random bit interleaving before modulation leads to improved ML asymptotes. Simulations confirm that this advantage is maintained also under iterative decoding.