Trellis-based decoding of high-dimensional block turbo codes

This paper introduces an efficient iterative decoding method for high-dimensional block turbo codes. To improve the decoding performance, we modified the soft decision Viterbi decoding algorithm, which is a trellis-based method. The iteration number can be significantly reduced in the soft output decoding process by applying multiple usage of extrinsic reliability information from all available axes and appropriately normalizing them. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed decoding process needs only about 30% of the iterations required to obtain the same performance with the conventional method at a bit error rate range of 10^-5 to 10^-6.