Patent Grant
8239711
The present invention relates generally to turbo codes for mobile communication systems and, more particularly, to the design of interleavers for turbo codes.
The basic function of a communication system is to send information over a communication channel from a source that generates the information to one or more destinations. In a digital communication system, the information is converted into a digital format and then transmitted over the communication channel. The transmission of digital information is subject to the adverse effects of the communication channel, such as co-channel and adjacent channel interference, noise, dispersion, and fading. These effects introduce errors into the transmitted data stream. These effects are particularly severe in a radio communication system.
In 1948, Claude E. Shannon demonstrated in a landmark paper that proper encoding of the digital information prior to transmission may reduce the errors introduced by a noisy channel to any desired level. Encoding is the process of adding redundancy to information prior to its transmission so that errors which may occur during transmission can be detected and/or corrected. At the receiving end, the decoder makes use of the redundant information and a priori knowledge of the coding scheme to detect and/or correct errors that may have occurred during transmission.
Many types of error correction codes have been devised, including block codes and convolutional codes. Turbo codes, which were introduced in 1993, are considered to have high error correction capability and good performance and have been selected for use in third and fourth generation mobile communication systems. In its most basic form, a turbo code comprises two parallel systematic convolutional encoders connected in parallel by an interleaver. The first encoder operates on the original input bits and generates first parity bits. The interleaver permutes the order of the input bits and the interleaved bits are supplied to the second encoder. The second encoder operates on the interleaved bits output by the interleaver and generates second parity bits. For each input bit, three output bits are generated: the input bit and two parity bits.
Iterative decoding is used at the receiver to decode turbo codes. A basic turbo decoder comprises two soft-input, soft-output (SISO) decoders connected in series by an interleaver. The received bits are input to the first decoder. The first decoder uses the received bits and extrinsic information fed back from the second decoder to generate a soft estimate of the original input bits expressed as a log-likelihood ratio and extrinsic information that is supplied to the second decoder. The extrinsic information output from the first decoder is interleaved before it is input to the second decoder to compensate for the interleaving performed at the encoder. The second decoder generates a more refined log-likelihood estimate of the original input bit and extrinsic information that is fed back to the first decoder. A final decision about the bit is made by hard limiting the soft estimate output by the second decoder.
The properties of the interleaver are important to the performance of a turbo coder. When turbo codes were first introduced, pseudorandom interleavers were proposed. For long block lengths, pseudorandom interleavers are problematic because the interleavers require large storage resources. At small block lengths, pseudorandom interleavers do not perform well. Other types of interleavers have been proposed including inter-block permutation (IBP) interleavers and almost regular permutation (ARP) interleavers. More recently, quadratic permutation polynomial (QPP) interleavers have been proposed. QPP interleavers provide good performance, have low computational complexity, and allow contention free parallel decoding. However, the design of good QPP interleavers is difficult because the number of potential QPP coefficients is too large to simulate and test individually. Some general guidelines for selecting QPP parameters have been proposed, but do not always yield the best results.
The present invention relates to a quadratic permutation polynomial (QPP) interleaver for turbo coding and decoding. The QPP interleaver has the form
Π(n)=f1n+f2n2 mod K,
where the QPP coefficients f1 and f2 are designed to provide good error performance for a given block length K. The QPP interleaver can be implemented with relatively simple hardware and enables contention free parallel decoding with multiple parallel decoders.
The present invention relates generally to turbo coding for mobile communication systems.
The turbo decoder 50 is an iterative decoder. The first decoder 54 operates on inputs vx1 and y1 and generates first extrinsic information w1 at its output. Adder 64 combines the systematic bits x with second extrinsic information w2 output by the second decoder 56 to generate the input vx1 to the first decoder 54. Similarly, the second decoder 56 operates on inputs vx2 and y2 and generates second extrinsic information w2. Adder 62 combines the systematic bits x with the extrinsic information w1 output from the first decoder 54. Interleaver 58 permutes the outputs of the adder 62 to obtain the second input vx2. The interleaver 58 is the same as the QPP interleaver 16 employed by the turbo encoder 10. De-interleaver 60 permutes the extrinsic information w2 output from the second decoder 56 before it is combined with the systematic bits x in adder 64. The de-interleaver 60 performs the reverse operation to restore the original order of the information.
According to the present invention, interleavers 16 and 58 and de-interleaver 60 each comprise a quadratic permutation polynomial (QPP) interleaver. QPP interleavers provide good error correction performance, have low computational complexity, and, if properly designed, allow contention-free access to the interleaver memory space. The interleaver permutes an input sequence of K symbols. The interleaver may be represented by a mapping function that maps a given output index n to a corresponding input index Π(n). For a QPP interleaver, the input index Π(n) is given by
Π(n)=f1n+f2n2 mod K (1)
where n≧0 and f1 and f2 are integers less than K.
QPP output indexes can be computed recursively without multiplication or modular operations. A simplified illustration is given in the following:
where g(n)≡f1+f2+2f2n mod K. It will be appreciated that g(n) can also be computed recursively according to:
g(n+1)=g(n)+2f2 mod K. (3)
Because both Π(n) and g(n) are greater than K, the modulo operations in both equations can be replaced by comparisons:
In some cases, the term 2f2 in Eq. (4) may be less than K. For these cases, the term 2f2 in the recursion of g(n) given by Eq. (4) may be replaced by (2f2−K):
The computational complexity of the QPP interleaver is the same as that of an Almost Regular Permutation (ARP) interleaver.
In operation, data d is written into memory 102 in non-interleaved order, and is read out of memory in interleaved order when interleaved data is needed. In one exemplary embodiment, the values to be interleaved are read into sequential addresses in memory 102 and interleaving is performed while reading the values from memory 102. During interleaving operation, the counter 108 is incremented at a predetermined clock rate. In each clock period, the address generator 104 computes an input index Π(n) according to Eq. (2), which is used to determine the address in memory 102 from which the current value is read. The data stored at the address provided by the address generator 104 is read out of memory 102.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that interleaving may also be performed in the process of writing data to memory 102.
In the turbo decoder 50, a single interleaver 100 may be used to function as the interleaver 58 and de-interleaver 60. The extrinsic information w1 output from decoder 54 is written sequentially into the memory 102 of the interleaver 100. The extrinsic information w2 output from decoder 56 is written into the same memory 102. During each clock period, the decoder 56 reads one symbol of the first extrinsic information w1 out of memory 102, and writes one symbol of the new extrinsic information w2 back to the same memory location. Interleaving is performed during the read operation and de-interleaving is performed by the subsequent write operation.
As known in the art, the first and second decoders 54, 56 may be implemented as parallel decoders. That is, decoders 54, 56 may each comprise two or more parallel decoders. The memory space used by the interleaver 58 and de-interleaver 60 can be divided into M memory banks, where M is the number of parallel decoders. To support parallel read-write access to these memory banks, a contention-free criterion is imposed on the interleaver 58 and de-interleaver 60. More specifically, during any given clock tick, each of the parallel decoders comprising decoders 54 or 56 should access different ones of the memory banks.
For any M that divides K, QPP interleavers support parallel decoding with M decoders. Let K=MW, then the primary index of Π(n+tW), for any t, is given by
As an example, let K=320=26×5 and Π(n)=19n+40n2 mod 320. In this example, it is possible to decode contention free with 2 decoders (i.e. M=2 and W=160) as shown in Table 1 below.
Table 1 gives the logical indexes for first and second parallel decoders, denoted D0 and D1 respectively. The column labeled intra-block permutation gives the logical index within a single memory bank. It may be noted that each of the decoders accesses the same logical address with its respective memory bank in the same clock tick. For example, at tick=2, each of the parallel decoders reads from the 38th address in its respective memory bank. The inter-block permutation indicates which of the two memory banks are currently being used by the first and second decoders D0 and D1 respectively. It can be noted that at any given clock tick, the parallel decoders D0 and D1 read and/or write from different memory banks.
It is also possible to decode with 4 or 5 parallel decoders as shown in Tables 2 and 3 respectively.
In fact, it is possible to decode with 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, 20, . . . parallel decoders. Thus, the contention free property of the QPP interleaver permits flexibility in the receiver design and pooling of decoding resources.
Good decoding performance can be achieved with properly designed QPP parameters. The problem is the complexity of selecting QPP parameters, such as the block length K and the QPP coefficients f1 and f2. In general, performance of the QPP interleaver improves as K increases. The problem of finding a good pair of QPP coefficients f1 and f2 for a practical block length K is made difficult because the dimension of the search space grows exponentially with the block length. Using the block length K=2048 as an example, the number of valid QPP coefficient pairs in the search space is more than one million. It is clear that exhaustive performance simulations over all possible QPP coefficient pairs cannot serve as a viable approach to find the best QPP coefficients. A practical search approach requires exploitation of further structural properties of the QPP interleavers.
One aspect of the present invention comprises a search algorithm to identify QPP parameters. By considering the algebraic-geometric properties of QPP interleavers, two important quantities of QPP interleavers can be identified: the modified degrees of nonlinearity ζ′ and the spread factor D. A brief description of the modified degrees of nonlinearity ζ′ and the spread factor D are presented below to assist the description of the search algorithm.
A QPP interleaver can be decomposed into ζ linear interleavers that are disturbed by (f2x2 mod K) at every index x. The quantity ζ is called the degree of nonlinearity of a QPP interleaver and is given by
ζ=K/gcd(2f2,K) Eq. (7)
where gcd(2f2,K) is the greatest common divisor of 2f2 and K. Since some of the disturbances may be identical, the modified degree of nonlinearity ζ′ is defined as the number of distinct elements in the list of disturbances
{f2x2 mod K, where x=0, 1, . . . ζ−1} Eq. (8).
The spread factor D is defined as the minimum local spread generated by disturbances when the QPP interleaver is considered as an interleaver-code Q in an algebraic-geometric space. First, the representatives of orbits of the interleaver-code is defined as
Θ={(x,f1x+f2x2 mod K), where x=0, 1, . . . ζ−1} Eq. (9)
For each algebraic-geometric point p from the set of representatives Θ, a local spread can be computed as:
Dp=min{δK(p,p′), where p′ is any point in Q and δK(p,p′)≦√{square root over (2K)}}, Eq. (10)
The term δK(p,p′) in Eq. 10 is the modulo-K Lee distance between the two algebraic-geometric points p and p′. The spread factor of a QPP interleaver is then defined as the smallest local spread of the representatives:
D=min{Dp, where p is in Θ} Eq. (11)
Both quantities ζ′ and D can be considered as measures of the randomness of a QPP interleaver. Since random interleavers have been shown to be beneficial for turbo coding performance, it has been proposed to find QPP coefficients based maximization of the following metric:
Ω=ζ′×log(D) Eq. (12)
This search criterion alone, however, does not work very well. For instance, let K=64. One candidate f1=1 and f2=4 has ζ′=4 and D=4. Another candidate f1=7 and f2=16 has ζ′=2 and D=8. It can be verified that the Ω metric for the former is greater than the later even though the turbo coding performance based on the later QPP candidate is better.
Another shortcoming of the metric given by Eq. 12 is that the multiplicity of error events is not considered. Two of the most important performance parameters of a turbo code are the so-called d2 distance and its multiplicity Nd2. The d2 distance is defined as the minimum Hamming weight in the turbo codeword generated by an input sequence of K−2 zeros and 2 ones, which are called the weight-2 input sequences. The corresponding multiplicity Nd2 is the number of such codewords. It is noted that the multiplicity Nd2 can be computed by testing all K(K−1) weight-2 input sequences for any QPP coefficient candidates. However, complexity of such computation grows quadratically with the block length K. It would quickly become impractical to incorporate such Nd2 computation routine into the test of every QPP coefficient candidate.
According to the present invention, the multiplicity N can be computed at the same time as the computation of the spread factor D. Suppose p* is an orbit representative that has the minimum local spread Dp*=D. Let Np* be the number of algebraic-geometric points p′ with Lee distance D away from p*. Note Np* that can be computed at the same time as the local spread of the point p*. The multiplicity N can then be computed by
N=ζ×Np* Eq. (13)
Using this approach, the search algorithm for good QPP coefficients is as follows. In the first step, three parameters are computed for each QPP candidates: the modified degrees of nonlinearity ζ′, the spread factor D, and the multiplicity N. In the second step, the candidates are ranked firstly by the spread factor D, secondly by the modified degrees of nonlinearity ζ′, and thirdly by the multiplicity N. That is, if two QPP candidates have the same spread factor but different modified degrees of nonlinearity, the one with the lower modified degrees of nonlinearity is discarded. Similarly, if two QPP candidates have the same spread factor and the modified degree of nonlinearity, the one with higher multiplicity is discarded. In the third step, the ranked list of candidates is truncated by keeping those candidates with spread factors in the vicinity of √{square root over (K/2)}
In the following, we shall use the search of QPP coefficients for K=352 as an illustrative example of the search algorithm. Since any prime number dividing K must also divide the f2 coefficient, there are at least three candidates for f2: 22, 44 and 88. Since f1 and K should not have any nontrivial common divisor, there are at least 160 candidates. Hence, there are approximately 480 valid QPP interleaver coefficients to search. A few exemplary candidates after the first step are listed below:
In step two, the list of candidates will are ranked and reduced. For instance, candidates A and B will be discarded because they have the same spread factor as candidates C and D but lower degrees of nonlinearity. Similarly, candidates D and F are discarded because they have the same spread factor and the modified degree of nonlinearity as candidates C and E but higher multiplicity. Hence, the search algorithm narrows down the 480 QPP candidates down to two: candidate C with f1=21 and f2=44 and candidate E with f1=5 and f2=22. Further performance verification based on union bounds or simulation can be used to compare the two remaining candidates. It is found that candidate C with f1=21 and f2=44 gives the better performance.
Table 5 below provides a set of QPP interleaver designs that have been found to yield good performance using the search criteria outlined above.
Each row in Table 5 represents one QPP parameter set or interleaver design. These interleaver designs can be used for turbo codes with either tail-biting or terminated trellises.
Selected QPP interleaver designs listed in Table 5 were simulated with rate ⅓ turbo codes based on Rel6-type trellis termination as illustrated in GPP TS 25.212 v6. For an input block of K bits, the coded output contains 3K+12 bits. The coded bits were assumed to be carried by QPSK modulation over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The received bits were decoded by a Max-Log MAP turbo decoder as shown in
The simulations shows good error performance for the QPP interleaver designs using a relatively simple hardware implementation. Additionally, the QPP interleaver designs enable contention-free decoder with parallel decoders.
The present invention may, of course, be carried out in other ways than those specifically set forth herein without departing from essential characteristics of the invention. The present embodiments are to be considered in all respects as illustrative and not restrictive, and all changes coming within the meaning and equivalency range of the appended claims are intended to be embraced therein.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60/865,233, filed Nov. 10, 2006, which is incorporated herein by reference.
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| Number | Date | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 2004025839 | Mar 2004 | WO |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20080115034 A1 | May 2008 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60865233 | Nov 2006 | US |
