LDPC-RS product codes for digital terrestrial broadcasting transmission system

Product code is a promising technique for the next generation digital terrestrial broadcasting transmission system, due to its superior error correction performance. In this paper, we propose an Low Density Parity Check-Reed Solomon (LDPC-RS) product code structure, along with a novel hybrid iterative decoding scheme. The decoding scheme combines a hybrid LDPC decoding technique and RS+LDPC hard decision decoding to form a 'turbo-like' decoding structure. By ingeniously ranging the order of different decoding techniques as well as performing error estimation and soft value modification at proper stages, the proposed decoding scheme greatly improves the error performance in low SNR regions while reducing the computational complexity in moderate and high SNR regions compared with the simple concatenation of LDPC and RS decoding. Moreover, we propose a rate compatible LDPC-RS product code to further reduce complexity by adaptively choosing the decoding code rate. Simulation results verify the outstanding error performance and suitability for the energy saving applications.