On distributed serially concatenated codes

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a new class of distributed codes for the 3-node relay channel, distributed serially concatenated codes (DSCCs). We provide a snap-shot analysis of the iterative DSCC decoder based on extrinsic information transfer characteristics and discuss new design aspects resulting from the extended code structure. Our simulation results show that DSCCs lead to an improved error-floor performance and an increased robustness against decoding errors at the relay compared to conventional distributed parallel concatenated coding schemes.