A Log-Domain Approximation of SOCS Decoding for Turbo Product Codes
This work addresses the need for low-complexity, hardware-friendly soft-output decoding for turbo product codes, offering an efficient approximation that maintains high performance.
The paper proposes a log-domain approximation of SOCS decoding for turbo product codes, achieving performance close to SOCS while outperforming the baseline Chase-Pyndiah decoder with the same list size.
This paper studies low-complexity soft-output decoding of turbo product codes with extended Bose--Chaudhuri--Hocquenghem component codes. Recent soft-output from covered space (SOCS) decoding substantially improves the quality of extrinsic information compared with the conventional Chase--Pyndiah decoder, but its probabilistic-domain implementation is less attractive for hardware-oriented realizations. We therefore propose a log-domain approximation of SOCS based on max-log approach. The proposed soft-input soft-output rule replaces probability-domain operations with a piecewise-linear function of reliability gaps between competing Chase-II decoding list and out of the list hypotheses, which preserves compatibility with the standard iterative TPC decoding loop. Numerical results for a TPC built from (256,239) eBCH component codes show that the proposed decoder clearly outperforms the baseline Chase--Pyndiah decoder with the same list size and approaches the performance of SOCS decoder.