Efficient Receivers for q-ary LDPC Coded Signals over Partial Response Channels

Recently q-ary Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes have been used to achieve performance close to the channel capacity in different channel environments, from satellite communications to magnetic data storage systems. Design of receivers employing these codes for transmissions over channels affected by InterSymbol Interference (ISI) is still an open issue. In fact, detection-and-decoding systems have to face the trade-off between error-rate performance and complexity. In this paper we compare some receiver architectures for 16-ary LDPC codes: serial and turbo concatenated schemes and a joint Message-Passing (MP) based receiver as well. Performance of these systems are evaluated over three different Partial Response (PR) channels, using simulations. Finally, ongoing future directions for research are discussed.