Soft-output-decoding: Some aspects from information theory
Simon Huettinger, Johannes B. Huber, Rolf Johannesson · 2002
Abstract — Recent literature presents methods for the analysis of concatenated coding schemes by solely characterizing the behavior of the component codes [4], [12], [16], [9], [7]. Component codes are analyzed either analytically using unique properties of special com-ponent codes, e.g., single–parity–check code or accumulator, or via simulations. The goals of this paper are to find fundamental insights into con-catenated codes by analyzing the input–output relation of their com-ponents from an information–theoretic point of view. We derive the Information Processing Characteristic (IPC), which completely char-acterizes the behavior of a coding scheme comprising encoder, code and decoder for the general class of linear codes. For time invariant convolutional codes it is studied how the IPC can be obtained in prac-tice. I.