Iterative Channel Estimation and Symbol Level Reed-Solomon Decoding Receivers for OFDM Systems

Abstract

Iterative channel estimation and decoding receivers have evolved over the years, most especially with Turbo and LPDC codes. Nevertheless, few works have determined the performance of symbol level Reed-Solomon (RS) codes in iterative receiver structures. The iterative channel estimation and symbol level RS decoding receiver structure found in literature concentrate on M-QAM systems over flat Rayleigh fading channels. In this paper, attention is focused on the performance of RS codes in iterative channel estimation and decoding receiver structures for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. Firstly, the paper extends the Koetter and Vardy (KV) RS iterative receiver structure over flat Rayleigh fading channels to frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. In addition, the paper develops a symbol level RS iterative receiver structure for OFDM systems on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels based on the Parity-check matrix Transformation Algorithm (PTA). The performance of the RS-KV and RS-PTA iterative receiver structures for OFDM systems are documented through computer simulation. The simulation results verify that both iterative receiver structures are suitable for real time RS OFDM wireless applications. The results also show that the developed RS-PTA iterative receiver structure is a low complexity and high performance alternative to the RS-KV iterative receiver structure.