In this paper, we investigate the system performance of decode and forward based bi-directional relaying based on symbol-wise XOR operation. This technique gives more freedom in selecting the modulation and coding scheme at relay stations, and significantly relaxes the transmission bottleneck. However, the performance degradation occurs when the modulation orders of both links differ from each other. To mitigate such an impact, we exploit a repetition coding scheme in conjunction with a redundant modulation code scheme by overlapping MCS levels. To this end, a system level simulation proves that the proposed scheme achieves about 43% capacity gain over bit-wise XOR based bi-directional relaying and gives additional 10% gain over symbol-wise XOR based bi-directional relaying.

Turbo codes are of particular use in applications of wireless communication systems, where various types of communication are required and the data rate must be changed, depending on the situation. In such applications, adaptation of turbo coding specifications is required in terms of coding block size, data speed, parity bit arrangement or configuration of a convolutional coder, as well as the need for real time processing. We present new ideas to provide these capabilities for a low power decoder circuit by focusing on the configuration of a convolutional decoding algorithm, which occupies a significant proportion of the hardware circuit. We utilize the Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (SOVA) for the base algorithm, produced by adding the concept of a soft output to the Viterbi Algorithm (VA). The Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) algorithm and its simplified version of MAX-LOG-MAP are also widely known. MAP is recognized as a means of achieving very good bit error rate (BER) characteristics. On the other hand SOVA has been regarded as a method which can be simply implemented with less computational resources, but at a cost of higher degradation. However, in many of recent systems we combine turbo coding with some other method such as Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) to maintain a good error correction performance and we only have to pay attention to the performance in the range of low carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR), where SOVA has fairly satisfactory BER characteristics. This makes the SOVA approach attractive for a low power programmable IP macro solution, when the fundamental advantage of SOVA is fully utilized in the implementation of an LSI circuit. We discuss the processing algorithm and circuit configuration and show that about 40% reduction in power consumption can be achieved. It is also shown that the IP macro can handle 1.5 Mbps information decoding at 100 MHz clock rate.

Thanks to the possibility of being able to implement them in decoders in relatively simple ways, turbo codes are being applied to various areas of engineering. Wireless communications is one of the most important applications, where various types of data communications are required and the speed of information and data capacity need to be changed with different rates of parity bit puncturing being adopted to obtain highly efficient transmission. In such applications, adaptation to various turbo-coding specifications on a real-time basis is needed as well as good bit-error-rate performance. We present a new concept for simplifying metric computation and programmable circuit configurations that focuses on the convolutional decoder, which occupies a significant portion of allocated hardware, and we fundamentally treat a simplified log-domain version of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm, usually know as the Max-Log-MAP (MLM), as a base algorithm. The sliding window method provides an attractive way of computing metric values for the Max-Log-MAP. However, this algorithm does cause degradation, especially when a high rate code is used, generated by bit puncturing. We propose a new means of avoiding this problem and demonstrate that the sliding window, and a modified version as well as other methods, should be flexibly selected to utilize hardware resources depending on turbo specifications. We demonstrated that our proposed methods provide almost the same BER performance as MLM even when a high rate puncturing rate of 5/6 is applied. Finally, we describe the new hardware architecture that we invented to cope with these programmability issues. We show that a turbo-decoding circuit can be implemented in the processor core and its associated unit to configure an LSI macro circuit. The proposed unit has about 60-K gates. We demonstrate that this architecture can be applied to about the 1.5-Mbps information bit throughput of turbo decoding with a 200-MHz clock cycle, which is achievable with today's advanced CMOS technologies.