Spatially Concatenated Codes With Turbo Equalization for Correlated Sources

This paper proposes for single carrier signaling a simple structure that combines turbo equalization and decoding of correlated sources in multipath-rich multiuser Rayleigh fading multiple access channels (MAC), where the correlation between the sources is exploited by vertical iterations (VI) between the decoders. The bit-flipping model with a flipping probability p_e is used to express the correlation ρ between the sources as ρ = 1-2p_e. The proposed simple structure, spatially concatenated codes (SpCC), can achieve turbo-like performance over MAC channels suffering from severe inter-symbol interference (ISI), even though it uses short memory convolutional codes. First of all, to achieve turbo-like performance we introduce VIs to exploit the knowledge about the source correlation by exchanging extrinsic log-likelihood ratio (LLR) between the two decoders. We then add a rate-1 doped accumulator (D-ACC) to flexibly adapt for the variation of correlations between the sources. The results of computer simulations and extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) analysis confirm that in multipath-rich environments the proposed structure can achieve excellent performances, 1.02-1.28 dB away from the Slepian-Wolf-Shannon limit, at 1% outage probability for 0 <; ρ ≤ 1.