An iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm for conventional concatenated codes

In this paper, we present an iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm for conventional concatenated codes, which incorporates Koetter-Vardy (KV) algorithm for outer codes and Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm for inner codes. After one round of decoding, the successfully decoded codewords from the outer decoder can be fed back to the inner decoder as constraint information. We compare several decoding algorithms for conventional concatenated codes in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) performance. Simulation results show that, for conventional concatenated codes, performance improvements of about 0.4 dB and 0.1 dB can be achieved by the iterative soft-decision decoding algorithm over the conventional two-stage decoding algorithm and the iterative hard-decision decoding algorithm, respectively.