Twisted-Pair Superposition Transmission

We propose in this paper a new coding scheme called twisted-pair superposition transmission (TPST). The encoding is to “mix together” a pair of basic codes by superposition, while the decoding can be implemented as a successive cancellation list decoding algorithm. The most significant features of the TPST code are its predictable performance that can be estimated numerically from the basic codes and its flexible construction in the sense that it can be easily adapted to different coding rates. To construct good TPST codes in the finite length regime, we propose two design approaches – rate allocation and partial superposition. By taking tail-biting convolutional codes (TBCC) as basic codes, we show by numerical results that the constructed TPST-TBCCs have performance close to the random coding union bound in the short length regime.