A proposed iterative decoder for ATSC standard

Concatenated code is widely used in multimedia systems, such as DVB-T, ISDB-T and ATSC as terrestrial digital Television broadcasting standard of Europe, Japan and America, respectively. The concatenated code usually consists of Reed-Solomon code as outer code, Convolutional code as inner coder. The byte-level interleave also used to avoid burst errors in severe wireless channel. This class of concatenated code is proved to be robust against multipath fading channel. In this paper, we review the conventional decoding algorithm for concatenated code, which is versatile to implement in hardware in decades. Then, a feasible iteration decoding method for concatenated code is proposed. The main contributions of the proposed method are (1) a novel iteration decoding method of concatenated codes, (2) a suitable modification of decoding algorithm of outer and inner codes for hardware implementation. The simulation shows that the proposed method achieves coding gain of 0.7dB upto 1.4dB in comparison with the conventional decoding method.