Conditionally Cycle-Free Generalized Tanner Graphs: Theory and Application to High-Rate Serially Concatenated Codes

Generalized Tanner graphs have been implicitly studied by a number of authors under the rubric of generalized parity-check matrices. This work considers the conditioning of binary hidden variables in such models in order to break all cycles and thus derive optimal soft-in soft-out (SISO) decoding algorithms. Conditionally cycle-free generalized Tanner graphs are shown to imply optimal SISO decoding algorithms for the first order Reed-Muller codes and their duals - the extended Hamming codes - which are substantially less complex than conventional bit-level trellis decoding. The study of low-complexity optimal SISO decoding algorithms for the family of extended Hamming codes is practically motivated. Specifically, it is shown that exended Hamming codes offer an attractive alternative to high-rate convolutional codes in terms of both performance and complexity for use in very high-rate, very low-floor, serially concatenated coding schemes.