An analysis of the orthogonality structures of convolutional codes for iterative decoding

The structures of convolutional self-orthogonal codes and convolutional self-doubly-orthogonal codes for both belief propagation and threshold iterative decoding algorithms are analyzed on the basis of difference sets and computation tree. It is shown that the double orthogonality property of convolutional self-doubly-orthogonal codes improves the code structure by maximizing the number of independent observations over two successive decoding iterations while minimizing the number of cycles of lengths 6 and 8 on the code graphs. Thus, the double orthogonality may improve the iterative decoding in both convergence speed and error performance. In addition, the double orthogonality makes the computation tree rigorously balanced. This allows the determination of the best weighing technique, so that the error performance of the iterative threshold decoding algorithm approaches that of the iterative belief propagation decoding algorithm, but at a substantial reduction of the implementation complexity.