Parallel Block Signal Processing in High Speed Wireless Communication Systems

Block transmission systems are used for high data rate transmissions over wireless channels. The block structure can be obtained by inserting guard periods, which are used to avoid inter block interference between the transmitted data blocks. However, these guard periods produce a transmission overhead and therefore reduce the throughput of the transmission system. By using so-called overlapping techniques, a block processing structure can be realized without inserting guard periods. In this paper we will use these techniques for two major processing tasks, the data estimation and the error correction Viterbi decoding. By avoiding the overhead in terms of guard periods and initialization/termination sequences for con- volutional coding, the throughput of the system can be increased significantly, while the bit error performance is only slightly decreased. Furthermore the overlapping approaches enable a block-wise parallel implementation of the receiver´s processing tasks. Depending on the used system parameters (block length, interleaving length, decoding block length), different levels of parallelization can be achieved.