Iterative decoding for GERAN MBMS

Various advanced methods have been proposed to achieve sufficiently high throughput as well as reliability for multimedia broadcast multicast services (MBMS) within 3GPP RAN and GERAN. One of the methods which yield promising results with only marginal system modifications is based on outer Reed-Solomon (RS) coding on the radio link control (RLC) layer. For initial studies standard decoding algorithms based on erasure-only decoders have been employed. In order to further improve the performance, the system can be viewed as a serially concatenated code such that iterative decoding can be performed. Then, advanced receivers for MBMS over GERAN would incorporate soft-in soft-cut (SISO) decoders for both the inner convolutional code, as well as the outer RS code. Whereas for the convolutional code, standard SISO algorithms are applied, for the outer RS code a standard Berlekamp-Massey algorithm is modified to accept soft-input and to provide soft-output. With this modified iterative decoding strategy, simulations have shown gains of up to 14% in throughput on typical mobile radio channels.