Trellis-based error-control (EC) codes, such as convolutional or turbo codes, are integrated with guided scrambling (GS) multimode coding to generate DC-free GS-convolutional/turbo codes. On the basis of the generators of the convolutional/turbo code, we employ puncturing or flipping to ensure that the EC-coded sequences are DC-free. At the receiver, convolutional/turbo decoding is performed before GS decoding to circumvent the performance degradation that can occur when GS decoding is performed prior to EC decoding. Performance of the new DC-free GS-convolutional/turbo codes is evaluated in terms of both spectral suppression and bit error rate (BER). It is shown that the new codes can provide superior BER performance and approximately the same suppression of low frequencies as the conventional concatenation of convolutional/turbo codes and DC-free GS codes.

In this paper we integrate convolutional/turbo encoding with multimode encoding to generate dc-free convolutional/turbo codes. Based on the generators of error-control codes, we employ flipping or puncturing to ensure that the coded sequences are dc-balanced. At the receiver, the channel output is first decoded by a convolutional/turbo decoder (with consideration of detection when flipping is used during encoding), and then by a dc-free decoder. We show that good spectrum performance can be obtained at the cost of an increase in complexity in the encoder and that excellent bit error rate (BER) performance can be obtained particularly when source data logic values are not equiprobable.

DC-free codes and error-control (EC) codes are widely used in digital transmission and storage systems. To improve system performance in terms of code rate, bit-error rate (BER), and low-frequency suppression, and to provide a flexible tradeoff between these parameters, this paper introduces a new class of codes with both dc-control and EC capability. The new codes integrate dc-free encoding and EC encoding, and are decoded by first applying standard EC decoding techniques prior to dc-free decoding, thereby avoiding the drawbacks that arise when dc-free decoding precedes EC decoding. The dc-free code property is introduced into standard EC codes through multimode coding techniques, at the cost of minor loss in BER performance on the additive white Gaussian noise channel, and some increase in implementation complexity, particularly at the encoder. This paper demonstrates that a wide variety of EC block codes can be integrated into this dc-free coding structure, including binary cyclic codes, binary primitive BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, Reed-Muller codes, and some capacity-approaching EC block codes, such as low-density parity-check codes and product codes with iterative decoding. Performance of the new dc-free EC block codes is presented.

In this letter, we present three new criteria for early stopping and error detection in turbo decoding. The approaches are based on monitoring the mean of the absolute values of the log-likelihood ratio of the decoded bits, which we show to be directly related to the variance of the metachannel. We demonstrate that this mean value increases as the number of errors in a frame decreases, and as a result, propose the simple mean-estimate criterion. We show that the systematic component of a terminated recursive systematic convolutional encoder used in turbo codes provides a built-in cyclic redundancy check (CRC). To further improve the performance, we also propose the mean-sign-change (MSC) criterion and the MSC-CRCeb criterion, in which a short external CRC code and the built-in CRC are concatenated with the MSC criterion.