Abstract
A benchmark in the development of product code is the invention of the iterative (turbo) decoding algorithm by Pyndiah. Pyndiah's algorithm works for any product code using linear block component codes. The turbo decoded product codes, now often referred to as turbo product codes (TPC) or block turbo codes (BTC), have the distinct merits of simple decoding, fast convergence, high code rate and very low (or no) error floor although their performance at the waterfall region is not as impressive as that of conventional turbo codes. This thesis explore the feasibility of using BTC in conjunction with the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. Our focus is on the major receiver design concerns that dominate the error rate performance of the system, namely, the channel estimation and decoding algorithm. While no original estimation or decoding algorithm is proposed, we examine the performance of a joint iterative channel estimation and decoding approach. As for the transmitted waveform design, we check the impact of the interleaver and present a new class of BTC that we refer to as parallel concatenated product codes (PCPC). The PCPC has a structure similar to the conventional turbo code with the component codes replaced by systematic product codes. Numerical results indicate that it does outperform its BTC counterpart with a comparable code rate.