Tradeoff of complexity and latency of iterative decoding for orthogonal convolutional codes

The complexities and latencies of iterative belief propagation (BP) and threshold decoding techniques for a new class of convolutional self-orthogonal codes are analysed using forward-only pipeline architectures. Computer simulation results show that over the additive white Gaussian noise channel at moderate signal- to-noise ratios, BP decoding yields one half the decoding delay when compared with threshold decoding at essentially the same error performances. However, the reduction in the decoding delay using BP is obtained at the cost of an increase of the implementation complexity.