Analysis, design, and iterative decoding of double serially concatenated codes with interleavers

A double serially concatenated code with two interleavers consists of the cascade of an outer encoder, an interleaver permuting the outer codeword bits, a middle encoder, another interleaver permuting the middle codeword bits, and an inner encoder whose input words are the permuted middle codewords. The construction can be generalized to h cascaded encoders separated by h-1 interleavers, where h>3. We obtain upper bounds to the average maximum likelihood bit-error probability of double serially concatenated block and convolutional coding schemes. Then, we derive design guidelines for the outer, middle, and inner codes that maximize the interleaver gain and the asymptotic slope of the error probability curves. Finally, we propose a low-complexity iterative decoding algorithm. Comparisons with parallel concatenated convolutional codes, known as “turbo codes”, and with the proposed serially concatenated convolutional codes are also presented, showing that in some cases, the new schemes offer better performance