A Successive Decoding Strategy for Channels With Memory

This paper presents a new technique for communication over channels with memory where the channel state is unknown at the transmitter and receiver. A deep interleaver combined with successive decoding decomposes a channel with memory into an array of parallel memoryless channels on which a conventional coding system can operate individually. The problems of joint channel estimation and decoding thus are separated without loss of capacity. This technique achieves channel capacity and so may be used to evaluate the capacities of different channels. A general information-theoretic framework is developed and applied to intersymbol interference (ISI), finite-state Markov, and Rayleigh-fading channels. A full system implementation, which performs within 1.1 dB of the channel capacity upper bound, is presented for the Rayleigh-fading channel