Iterative decoding of parallel and serial concatenated single parity check product codes

An efficient, iterative soft-in-soft-out decoding scheme is employed for the parallel and serially concatenated single parity check (SPC) product codes, which has very low complexity, requiring only two addition-equivalent-operations per information bit. For a rate 0.8637 of parallel concatenated SPC product code, a performance of BER=10^-5 at E_b/N₀=3.66 dB can be achieved using this decoding scheme, which is within 1 dB from the Shannon limit.