Closed-chain error correction technique for turbo product codes

In this work, we propose a new decoding algorithm to correct closed-chains error patterns in hard-input hard-output (HIHO) turbo product codes (TPC). The proposed technique is based on correlating the horizontal and vertical component codes to estimate the location of the erroneous bits in the closed-chain of errors, then erasure decoding is used to correct the closed-chain of errors. Simulation results demonstrated that, for particular codes, a noticeable coding gain improvement of about 1.5 dB can be achieved when compared to the standard HIHO decoding and about 0.8 dB when compared to the state of the art decoding techniques. The computational complexity of the proposed decoder can be substantially reduced at moderate and high signal-to-noise ratios by stopping the iterative process when it is no more beneficial to perform more iterations.