Performance of weighted nonbinary repeat-accumulate codes over GF(Q) with Q-ary orthogonal modulation

Abstract

An approximate upper bound is derived to the maximum likelihood decoding threshold of weighted nonbinary repeat-accumulate (WNRA) codes over GF(q) with q-ary orthogonal modulation and coherent detection over the additive white Gaussian noise channel. As with binary RA codes, WNRA codes show the potential for achieving the channel capacity with decreasing code rate for large enough q.