Parallel concatenated turbo codes for continuous phase modulation

There are several ways to use iterative decoding techniques with coded continuous phase modulation (CPM). This paper presents a method using parallel concatenation of convolutionally-coded CPM. All CPM schemes can be decomposed into a ring convolutional code and a memoryless signal mapper. This allows a properly designed convolutional code trellis to be combined with the CPM trellis, producing the joint trellis of a constituent code. Parallel concatenation of such constituent codes combined with iterative decoding yields very good performance. We present the results of code searches for two binary CPM schemes, each using bit interleaving and symbol interleaving. Simulation results using various length interleavers are also provided. Low complexity encoders are shown to perform better using bit interleaving, whereas encoders with higher complexity perform better with symbol interleaving.