Improved MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC With Variable-Length Soft-Decision Decoding of the Quantized Spectral Coefficients

MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is designed for low bit rate applications, such as audio streaming in mobile communications. The HE-AAC audio codec offers a better coding efficiency since variable-length codes (VLCs) are adopted. However, HE-AAC has originally been designed for storage and error-free transmission conditions. For the transmission over bit error-prone channels, error propagation is a serious problem for the VLCs. Therefore, a robust HE-AAC decoder is desired, especially for mobile communications. In contrast to traditional hard-decision decoding, utilizing bit-wise channel reliability information, softdecision (SD) decoding has been known to offer better audio quality. In HE-AAC, the global gain parameter is coded with fixedlength codes (FLCs), while the scale factors and quantized spectral coefficients are coded with VLCs. In this work, we apply FL/SD decoding to the global gain parameter, VL/SD decoding to the parameters scale factors and quantized spectral coefficients. Especially, in order to apply VL/SD decoding to the quantized spectral coefficients, a new modified trellis representation in VL/SD decoding is proposed. An improved HE-AAC performance is clearly observed, with the support of both instrumental measurements and a subjective listening test.

Efficient Soft-Decision Maximum-Likelihood Decoding of BCH Code in the GNSS

Soft-decision decoding of BCH code in the global navigation satellite system( GNSS) is investigated in order to improve the performance of traditional hard-decision decoding. Using the nice structural properties of BCH code,a soft-decision decoding scheme is proposed. It is theoretically shown that the proposed scheme exactly performs maximum-likelihood( ML) decoding,which means the decoding performance is optimal. Moreover,an efficient implementation method of the proposed scheme is designed based on Viterbi algorithm. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed soft-decision ML decoding scheme is significantly improved compared with the traditional hard-decision decoding method at the expense of moderate complexity increase.

Study of LDPC Coded SFH System with Partial-Band Interference

The application of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code in the anti-interference systems has drawn an increasing attention, due to its admiring performance which is very close to the theory limit. This paper focuses on a LDPC encoded slow frequency hopping (SFH) communication system with partial-band interference. Firstly, a modified soft- decision algorithm based on the utilization of interference information is proposed, and its performance is compared with some other soft-decision methods. Secondly, with numerical simulation, the influence of code rate, code length and the number of symbols per hops on the performance of the system with partial band noise interference is illustrated and examined in detail. Considering the great influence of hops per symbol on the performance, interleaver should be used and its influence on the performance is further examined by simulation. Finally, some constructive advises for the design of LDPC coded SFH system are given. Simulation results show that, with a reasonable design, the SFH system with LDPC code could achieve a desirable performance.

Program Error Mitigation in MLC NAND Flash Memory with Soft Decision Decoders

Benefiting from strong decoding capabilities,soft-decision decoding has been used to replace hard-decision decoding in various communication systems,and NAND flash memory systems are no exception.However,soft-decision decoding relies heavily on accurate soft information.Owing to the incremental step pulse programming(ISPP),program errors(PEs)in multi-level cell(MLC)NAND flash memory have different characteristics compared to other types of errors,which is very difficult to obtain such accurate soft information.Therefore,the characteristics of the log-likelihood ratio(LLR)of PEs are investigated first in this paper.Accordingly,a PE-aware statistical method is proposed to determine the usage of PE mitigation schemes.In order to reduce the PE estimating workload of the controller,an adaptive blind clipping(ABC)scheme is proposed subsequently to approximate the PEs contaminated LLR with different decoding trials.Finally,simulation results demonstrate that(1)the proposed PE-aware statistical method is effective in practice,and(2)ABC scheme is able to provide satisfactory bit error rate(BER)and frame error rate(FER)performance in a penalty of negligible increasing of decoding latency.

Cooperative DVB-SH Satellite Broadcasting Systems with Rotated Signal Constellations

In this paper,we study the advantages of cooperation in broadcasting systems from a geosynchronous earth orbit(GEO)satellite to mobile terminals(MTs),achieved through a terrestrial complementary ground station(CGS) with fixed installment,which acts as a relay.Moreover and in the context of the digital video broadcasting-satellite-to-handheld(DVB-SH) standard,the performance improvements offered by the rotated constellations method are investigated,where prior transmission,a phase rotation of the transmitted symbols by a fixed angle is applied followed by a random component interleaver.Turbo codes with soft decision decoding and appropriate random channel interleavers are also considered.We present analytical expressions for the bit log-likelihood ratios(LLRs)that are needed for soft decision decoding at the MT turbo decoder,while the code combining technique is adapted to improve the end-to-end(E2E) performance.Then,we obtain through extensive computer simulations the average bit error probability(ABEP) of quadrature phase-shift keying(QPSK) signals received over pure land-mobile satellite(LMS)and pure CGS links for coding rates 1/3 and6/7.Moreover,the optimal rotation angles are obtained for both links.E2 E ABEP results are then presented assuming cooperation between GEO and CGS,while the power allocation issue is investigated under fixed total transmission power.Our performance evaluation results show that by using the constellation rotation technique,a performance gain can be achieved for high coding rates.

Iterative list decoding approach for Reed-Solomon codes

A novel adaptively iterative list decoding(ILD) approach using for Reed-Solomon(RS) codes was investigated. The proposed scheme is exploited to reduce the complexity of RS Chase algorithm(CA) via an iterative decoding attempt mode. In each decoding attempt process, a test pattern is generated by flipping the bits of the least reliable positions(LRPs) within the received hard-decision(HD) vector. The ILD algorithm continues until a test pattern is successfully decoded by the underlying Berlekamp-Massey algorithm(BMA) of RS codes. Flipping within the same bits, the ILD algorithm provides the same test pattern set as the conventional RS CA, thus there is no degradation in error-rate performance. Without decoding all test patterns, the ILD algorithm can simplify the decoding complexity by its early termination. Simulation results show that the average complexity of the ILD algorithm is much lower than that of the conventional RS CA(and is similar to that of BMA decoding) at high signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) region with no less to the RS CA decoding error-rate performance.