Unequal-Error-Correcting-Capability-Aware Iterative Receiver for (Parallel) Turbo-Coded Communications

An iterative detection and decoding (IDD) technique has recently received much attention due to its capacity approaching performance and manageable complexity for (parallel) turbo-coded systems. The existing IDD receivers process indiscriminately the a priori information of the systematic bits and the parity bits generated by the turbo decoder in the front-end detection. In this paper, we first show that the parity bits of the parallel turbo codes are inherently less protected than the systematic bits, which leads to suboptimality for the IDD receivers. Based on this observation, we then propose an unequal-error-correcting-capability-aware technique to mitigate the associated performance loss. As an illustrative example, the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) filtering and soft interference cancelation (MMSE-SIC)-aided iterative receiver for parallel-turbo-coded multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems is employed in this paper. Numerical results manifest that the MMSE-SIC-aided iterative receiver based on the proposed paradigm achieves noticeable performance gains over the conventional unequal-error-correcting-capability-agnostic one even with reduced computational complexity. The extension of the proposed principle to other iterative algorithms for parallel-turbo-coded data transmission is straightforward.