Blind turbo-detection in the presence of phase noise

Blind coherent detection of convolutional turbo codes is a hard problem in the presence of strong phase noise. Since the operating signal-to-noise ratio is usually very low, phase synchronisation algorithms suffer from phase ambiguities and cycle slips. A possible remedy is to perform joint phase estimation and decoding on a combined state-space model for the time-varying phase and the component convolutional codes. We demonstrate that joint phase estimation and decoding is in fact mandatory only for one component code, while ordinary BCJR decoding can be used for the second component code. Monte Carlo simulations for the turbo code used in the DVB-RCS standard show that the performances of the proposed scheme are close to decoding with perfect knowledge of the phase.