Procedures for Efficient Iterative Decoding of Orthogonal Convolutional Codes

A procedure for the forward-only iterative belief propagation decoding of orthogonal convolutional codes is presented. It can be dramatically simplified to perform the iterative threshold decoding of convolutional self-doubly-orthogonal codes without interleaving. These procedures can help implement iterative decoders efficiently using a serial concatenation of one-step BP decoders or one-step threshold decoders, respectively. Simulations have shown that the error performance of orthogonal convolutional codes can be improved by iterative decoding whether based on belief propagation decoding or threshold decoding. For convolutional self-doubly-orthogonal codes, iterative threshold decoding can achieve the same error performance as iterative belief propagation decoding, but with greatly reduced decoding complexity, allowing an advantageous tradeoff between implementation complexity and latency.