Multiple serially concatenated single parity check codes

Single parity check (SPC) codes are applied in a serial concatenation structure to produce a high performance coding scheme with very low complexity. We show a simple yet elegant way of improving the system performance at low bit error rates (BER), without changing the overall code parameters (code rate, code block length). We compare its BER performance to the best 64-state convolutional codes, and the 16-state turbo codes. Comparisons show that its performance is only slightly poorer. Despite this inferior performance, the scheme is very suitable for practical implementation due to its flexible code parameters. We conclude by showing that its decoding complexity is more than 1 order of magnitude less than that of a 16-state turbo code