This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2590437, IEEE
Communications Letters
Faster than Nyquist Transmission with Multiple
Turbo-like Codes
Donghoon Kang and Wangrok Oh, Member, IEEE
AbstractThe performance of turbo-like codes highly depends
on their frame size and thus, the bit error rate (BER) perfor-
mance of turbo-like codes can be improved by increasing the
frame size. Unfortunately, increasing the frame size induces some
drawbacks such as the increases of transmission and decoding la-
tencies. On the other hand, faster than Nyquist (FTN) transmitter
transmits modulated symbols at a rate higher than the Nyquist
rate and thus, inter-symbol interference (ISI) is introduced. In
this letter, we propose an FTN system with multiple turbo-like
codes. In the proposed scheme, an information frame is divided
into subframes and each subframes are encoded independently
by multiple turbo-like encoders before being presented at a FTN
modulator. Due to the ISI induced within the FTN modulator,
the code frames generated by the multiple turbo-like encoders
are combined and act as a larger code frame. Compared with
conventional coded FTN schemes, the proposed scheme not only
improve the BER performance but also reduce the decoding
latency.
Index TermsFaster-than-Nyquist, turbo-like codes, joint de-
coding and demodulation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I T is well known that the performance of turbo-like codes
[1][3] highly depends on their frame size and thus, the
performance of turbo-like codes can be improved by increasing
the frame size. However, the increase of transmission and
decoding latencies due to the increase of the frame size are
inevitable [4]. To reduce the decoding latency of turbo-like
codes, several parallel decoding schemes have been proposed
[5], [6]. In the parallel decoding schemes, a received code
frame is decomposed into several subframes and then the
subframes are decoded in parallel by multiple soft-input soft-
output (SISO) decoders. To minimize the performance loss
due to the parallel decoding, the initial and the final states
of each subframes should be determined properly within the
corresponding SISO decoders. Hence, an additional decoding
complexity is required for dummy metrics used to find the
initial and the final states. In addition, the parallel decoding
schemes usually not only suffer some degree of performance
degradation but also require a specially designed contention-
free interleaver to solve the memory collision problem.
Recently, faster than Nyquist (FTN) transmission scheme
has been attracting great attention as a spectral efficient
transmission scheme [7][9]. In the FTN transmission scheme,
modulated symbols are transmitted at a rate higher than
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) grant
funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (NRF-2014R1A1A2058836).
The authors are with the Department of Information Communications
Engineering, Chungnam National Univeristy (CNU), Daejeon 34134, Korea
(email: kingrock@cnu.ac.kr).
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1
the Nyquist rate and thus, inter-symbol interference (ISI) is
induced. Hence, to guarantee the performance of the FTN
transmission, a suitable ISI cancellation algorithm such as
the Viterbi algorithm [10], Bahl Cocke Jelinek and Raviv
algorithm [11] and decision feedback equalizer [12] should
be implemented at the receiver. On the other hand, due to the
intentional ISI induced by the FTN modulator, correlations
among adjacent modulation symbols are newly induced. By
exploiting the correlations, the FTN modulator combined
with the turbo-like encoder can form a new type of serial
concatenated coding scheme. Hence, an additional coding gain
can be achieved by employing a proper joint decoding and
FTN demodulation scheme.
In this letter, we propose a FTN transmission scheme
with multiple turbo-like codes. In the proposed scheme, an
information frame is divided into J subframes and then
each subframes are encoded independently with identical J
turbo-like encoders. The J code frames from each encoders
are interleaved together before being presented to the FTN
modulator. Within the FTN modulator, the code frames from
J turbo-like encoders are correlated due to the intentional ISI
induced by the FTN modulator and form a code frame with a
larger frame size. Hence, the proposed scheme can be regarded
as a new form of serial concatenated coding scheme and thus,
the proposed scheme can offer a better coding gain compared
to the conventional turbo-like coded FTN systems. Here, J
turbo-like encoders and the FTN modulator act as an outer
encoder and an inner encoder, respectively. In addition, unlike
the conventional serial concatenated coding schemes, overall
code rate is not lowered by the FTN modulator in the proposed
scheme. At the receiver, the output of an FTN demapper
is deinterleaved and then demultiplexed to J subframes and
then the subframes are decoded by J identical decoders in
parallel. Due to the inherent parallel decodable structure of
the proposed scheme, parallel decoding at the receiver is
straightforward and thus the required decoding latency can be
reduced without any additional complexity and performance
loss.
II. P ROPOSED SCHEME
The transmitter structure for the proposed scheme is de-
picted in Fig. 1. Information frame u of size K are divided into
J subframes of size N = K/J and then the subframes are en-
coded independently with identical turbo-like encoders whose
code rate is r. The resulting code frames cj , j = 0, 1, , J 1
of size N/r are multiplexed into a frame of size K/r and then
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Communications Letters
2

d0 c0 variance is N0 /2 per dimension, respectively. In the symbol

Encoder
demapper, log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for vnk are generated
d1
Encoder
c1 based on the matched filter output samples, an as follows:
u v Symbol a FTN x(t)
S/P P/S Interleaver
.. (an n an )2
 
Mapper Modulator X
. exp
an s0
N0
dJ 1 cJ k


Encoder
1
L vn = ln X (5)
(an n an )2
 
exp
a s
N0
n 1
Fig. 1. Transmitter block diagram of the proposed scheme.
where s0 and s1 denote the set of M -ary symbols correspond-
ing to vnk = 0 and vnk = 1, respectively. The LLRs generated
interleaved before being presented to the symbol mapper. The
at the demapper are deinterleaved and then demultiplexed
output of the interleaver is given by
n o into J streams before being presented to J identical channel
v = v00 , v01 , , v0m1 , v10 , , v m1
K
1
decoders. Each channel decoder performs the first decoding
rm
iteration and generates LLRs for the information and the parity
= P {c0 , c1 , , cJ1 } . (1) bits. The resulting LLRs are multiplexed and interleaved and
Here, P{} denotes the interleaving function and m = log2 M then fed back to an ISI estimator. To estimate the ISI, soft
where M is a modulation order. The output of the interleaver symbol value an is generated with the a priori information on
v are mapped to M -ary symbols, s {sl |l = 0, 1, , M 1} vnk as follows:
by an M -ary symbol mapper. The output of the symbol mapper M 1
a is given by
X
an = sl P {an = sl }
n o
l=0
a = a0 , a1 , , a K 1 . (2) M 1 m1
rm
X Y
P vnk = 1

Here, an = vn0 , vn1 , , vnm1 where {} denotes the

= sl k (sl ) (6)
l=0 k=0
symbol mapping function and vnk , k = 0, 1, , m 1 denotes
the kth bit mapped to the M -ary symbol an . The M -ary where 1k (sl ) {0, 1} denotes the kth bit mapped to sl .
symbols a are presented to the FTN modulator and finally, Here, the a priori probabilities, P {vnk = 0} and P {vnk = 1}
the transmitted signal x(t) is given by are calculated based on the LLRs L(v) generated within the
K
rm 1
channel decoders as follows:
X
L(v k )
h i
x(t) = an h (t n Ts ) (3) exp (1)b 2n
n=0 P {vnk = b} = h i h i , b {0, 1}
L(v k ) L(v k )
where is an FTN factor, h(t) is the impulse response of a exp + 2n + exp 2n
root raised cosine (RRC) filter and 1/Ts is the Nyquist rate. (7)
and the ISI term In can be estimated with the soft symbol
L(c0 ) values an as follows:
..
y(t)
Matched + Symbol L(v) .. . u K
rm 1
S/P . P/S
Filter Demapper
In =
X
L(cJ 1 )
ak g ((n k) Ts ) an . (8)
k=0
L(c0 )

I L(v)
..
P/S
L(cJ 1 )
Fig. 2. Receiver block diagram of the proposed scheme.
The block diagram of the receiver for the proposed scheme
is depicted in Fig. 2. In the proposed scheme, iterative joint
demodulation and decoding is performed within the receiver,
i.e., the ISI induced by the FTN transmission is iteratively
estimated and compensated based on the decoder output [13].
The received signal y(t) is matched filtered and sampled at
every Ts . The matched filter output samples an is given by
K coded FTN systems. Note that, for a fixed information frame
1. (4)
an = n (an + In ) + Nn , n = 0, 1, ,
rm
Here, n , In and Nn denote an independent Rayleigh fading
coefficient, the ISI due to the FTN modulator and an additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) sample whose mean is zero and
Here, g(t) = (h(t) h(t)) where denotes the convolution
.
operator. Finally, the received symbol, an are updated as
follows:
an an n In , (9)
and the procedure described above is repeated for a predeter-
mined number of iterations.
As can be seen in Fig. 2, there are J decoders and each
decoders perform decoding operations for the received code
K
frame of length rJ = Nr in parallel. Since the decoding latency
is linearly depend on the length of codeword [5], for a fixed
information frame size K, the decoding latency is reduced to
1
J in the proposed scheme compared to that of conventional
size K, the required decoding complexity is not depend on
J [14] and thus, the required decoding complexity of the
proposed scheme is identical to that of the conventional coded
FTN system.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2590437, IEEE
Communications Letters
3

III. N UMERICAL R ESULTS the performance improvement by increasing J in the proposed

For all the numerical results, the turbo code is used for
channel code whose parameters are summarized in Table 1.
The number of joint decoding and demodulation iterations is
set to 20 and the FTN factor of 0.5 and the quadrature phase
shift keying symbol mapping are assumed. For the interleaver
between the encoders and the symbol mapper, interleaver
pattern is randomly generated for each information frames.
TABLE I
PARAMETERS FOR THE T URBO C ODE
scheme. Similar results can be observed by comparing the
performances with a fixed K and the code rates of 1/2 and
1/3. As the code rate is increased, the coding gain offered by
the turbo code is decreased and the amount of performance
improvements with the proposed scheme increases.
The BER performances of the proposed scheme under inde-
pendent Rayleigh fading channel are shown in Fig. 4. Similar
to the performances under AWGN channel, the proposed
scheme offers the better BER performances compared to that
of the conventional coded FTN system.

Code rate, r 1/3, 1/2 IV. C ONCLUSION

Generating polynomials (1, g1 /g2 ) = (1, 5/7)8 In this letter, the FTN system with multiple turbo-like codes
Interleaver QPP interleaver [15]
Interleaver length, N 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048
is proposed. In the proposed scheme, multiple code frames are
Decoding algorithm Max-log MAP combined by the intentional ISI induced by the FTN modulator
Channel models AWGN, Rayleigh and effectively, act as a larger code frame. The proposed
scheme not only offers a better BER performance but also
requires less decoding latency due to the inherent parallel
0
10
r = 1/3
decoding structure compared to the conventional coded FTN
r = 1/2 systems. The performance gains achieved by the proposed
J=1
1
10
J=2 scheme are more prominent when the information frame size
J=4
J=8
is small and/or the code rate is high.
2
10
BER

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