Decoding of forward error correction codes in the presence of phase noise and thermal noise

摘要

A communication receiver includes a front end, which is arranged to receive a Radio Frequency (RF) signal, which includes modulated symbols carrying data that have been encoded by a block Forward Error Correction (FEC) code. The front end converts the RF signal to a sequence of soft received symbols, wherein the soft received symbols are subject to distortion by at least first and second noise components having respective at least first and second statistical distributions. A metric calculation unit is arranged to process the soft received symbols so as to extract parameters indicative of the at least first and second statistical distributions, and to compute FEC metrics based on the extracted parameters. A FEC decoder is arranged to accept the FEC metrics as input, and to process the metrics in an iterative FEC decoding process so as to decode the FEC code and reconstruct the data.