Binary SOVA and Nonbinary LDPC Codes for Turbo Equalization in Magnetic Recording Channels

Nonbinary low-density parity check (LDPC) codes can provide coding gains over binary LDPC codes at the cost of increased complexity. For magnetic recording channels, optimal detectors for the nonbinary codes are symbol-based, which are significantly more complex than binary detectors. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using much less complex bit-based soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) as a channel detector for nonbinary LDPC codes and performing turbo iterations between the SOVA and the nonbinary LDPC decoder. We show that performance gains can still be obtained by the turbo iterations by using the bit-based SOVA, although the performance gains are suboptimal to the symbol-based detectors. This scheme can be useful in low-complexity nonbinary LDPC coding systems.