The Error-Pattern-Correcting Turbo Equalizer: Spectrum Thinning at High SNRs

The error-pattern correcting code (EPCC) is a code designed to correct frequently observed error cluster patterns of the intersymbol interference (ISI) channel. This paper focuses on developing theoretical understanding of the performance of serial concatenation of the EPCC with an outer recursive systematic convolutional code (RSCC) in ISI channel environments. To analyze the performance of this EPCC-RSCC concatenation, an upper union bound on the maximum-likelihood (ML) bit-error rate (BER), averaged over all possible interleavers, is derived which offers crucial insights into the error floor behavior of the matching turbo decoder. The ML bound is also used to compare the performance of EPCC-RSCC to that of a stand-alone RSCC in serial concatenation to precoded and nonprecoded ISI channels. This comparison shows that by targeting the low Hamming-weight interleaved errors of the RSCC, which result in low Euclidean distance error events in the channel detector, EPCC-RSCC exhibits a much lower BER floor compared to conventional schemes, especially for high rate applications and short interleaver lengths. The error rate performance of an iterative suboptimal turbo equalizer (TE), called TE-EPCC, is also demonstrated to converge close to the ML bound at high SNR.