A comparison of several strategies for iteratively decoding serially concatenated convolutional codes in multipath Rayleigh fading environment

We investigate two iterative methods for decoding serially concatenated convolutional codes (SCCC) on multipath Rayleigh fading channels. One method employs optimal maximum a posterior (MAP) decoders or sub-optimum versions. The second slightly differs and is based on a soft-in soft-out (SISO) parallel decision-feedback decoder (PDFD), used for iteratively performing joint equalization and inner decoding together with outer decoding. Simulation results show that the first iterative process is only 0.7 dB better than the second one, which is however far less complex.