Iterative demodulation and decoding of turbo-coded M-ary noncoherent orthogonal modulation

This paper considers bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) with a turbo channel code and M-ary orthogonal modulation. The BICM signal is iteratively demodulated and decoded in a noncoherent fashion. A soft demodulator suitable for noncoherent orthogonal modulation is presented, and the convergence of the iterative receiver is analyzed through extrinsic information transfer charts. The demodulator can work either with or without fading amplitude estimates. Extensive simulation results are presented for the well-known cdma-2000 turbo code, and the results are compared with the corresponding channel capacities, which are computed using a Monte Carlo technique. The results indicate gains of up to 1 dB relative to noniterative BICM can be achieved with the iterative receiver.