Evolution Analysis of Iterative BICM Receivers with Expectation Propagation over ISI Channels

This paper investigates the dynamic behaviour of doubly iterative bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) receivers based on expectation propagation (EP). When implemented in the frequency domain, for single-carrier (SC) systems, such receivers achieve attractive performance-complexity trade-offs in quasi-static wideband channels. With this category of receivers, conventional binary extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions are subject to a great number of parameters, including channel realizations, constellation and inner iteration parameters. Hence, this paper proposes a novel extrinsic information evolution analysis method which simplifies the receiver’s EXIT function into independent inner transfer functions. The core idea is to track state-evolution dynamics of EP through numerically stable extrinsic variance/information transfer (EXVIT) functions. Numerical results attest to the accuracy of this method for tracking the asymptotic receiver behaviour.