Joint Channel Estimation and Decoding of Root-LDPC Codes in Block-Fading Channels

We study iterative receivers for joint decoding and channel-state estimation for transmission on block-fading channels of root- LDPC-coded signals. Root-LDPC codes are known to be most performant codes for block-fading channels, as their spacial "root" structure allows to get the full-diversity property. This property ensures a good error decoding performance of root LDPC codes, especially in contrast with the performance standard LDPC codes (having the maximum diversity equal to 1). However, as any channel code, root-LDPC codes also suffer from the diversity loss when the channel state information is not known at the receiver. In this work we propose a joint channel estimation- decoding scheme for root- LDPC codes that helps to overcome this problem and still to have the full-diversity.