Multi-ary Soft Output Viterbi decoding Algorithm for Unitary Space-Time Symbol-Based Turbo Code

UST symbol-based turbo code has recently been proposed which can reduce the system complexity and calculation amount compared with bit-wise concatenation scheme. However, the corresponding MAP decoding algorithm still makes hardware unbearable and later its simplified versions, Max-Log-MAP and Log-MAP algorithms, appeared. In this paper, we propose a multiary SOVA decoding algorithm for UST symbol-based turbo code. Using our UST symbol-based SOVA, soft output information from the prior iteration can be accepted as the a priori information for current iteration. Notably, the experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve close performance to Max-Log-MAP and Log-MAP algorithms with lower complexity. The performance of the SOVA and that of MAP algorithm are almost the same at a BER of 10-5, and is even better for a higher BER.