Downlink transmission of broadband OFCDM systems-part IV: soft decision

In this paper, the performance of turbo-coded orthogonal frequency and code-division multiplexing (OFCDM) systems is investigated with soft multicode interference (MCI) cancellation and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) detection for downlink transmission in future high-speed wireless communications. To regenerate the soft interference signal, the conventional turbo decoding algorithm must be modified to provide log-likelihood ratio (LLR) values for all coded bits. Based on the LLR outputs of turbo decoder, two soft-decision functions are proposed, called LLR-soft-decision and Gaussian-soft-decision functions. The Gaussian assumptions used for deriving these two soft functions are verified by simulation results, and simple methods are proposed to estimate parameters used in the soft functions in practical systems. By means of computer simulations, the performance of soft MCI cancellation is studied extensively and compared with that of hard ones. It is shown that in a highly frequency-selective channel, soft MCI cancellation and MMSE detection can significantly improve the performance of turbo-coded OFCDM systems. Two iterations in turbo decoding are sufficient for both hard and soft-decision functions. The proposed soft-decision functions outperform the hard-decision function with various channel conditions and system parameters, such as the channel correlation, the quality of channel estimation, the number of iterations in turbo decoding and the frequency-domain spreading factor (N/sub F/). Furthermore, the Gaussian-soft-decision function provides better performance than the LLR-soft-decision function. Finally, although frequency diversity gain is saturated for large channel correlation when N/sub F/ is large as in , the gain increases further with increasing N/sub F/ for small channel correlation even when N/sub F/ is large.