Self-Protection of Turbo- and LDPC-Coded OFDM Systems against Non-Stationary Disturbances

This paper presents a method to protect turbo- and low density parity check (LDPC)-coded OFDM systems against non-stationary disturbances without using external codes. The technique does not alter the structure of the original code and the constellation mapper/demapper, but requires the insertion of a so-called self-protection unit (SPU) between the coding and constellation mapping units. The SPU enhances the burst-error-correction capabilities of turbo and LDPC codes by combining erasure-decoding, subframing (i.e., reordering the coded data into subframes), and the optional use of subframe interleaving to spread error bursts. Self-protected systems exhibit a reduced latency and storage capacity compared to classical channel interleaving schemes with similar protection level.