Channel Estimation and LDPC Decoding for Bursty Phase Noise

Journal article, 2026

Time-varying distortions in communication systems can significantly degrade the performance of soft-decision forward error correction. This paper presents a burst-aware (BA) low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoding scheme for channels affected by bursty phase noise. By applying differential coding to a Wiener process with time-varying innovation variance, bursty differential phase noise is obtained. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to conventional decoding, the BA scheme achieves gains in the signal-to-noise ratio of up to 0.9 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 4 × 10⁻³ and more than 2 dB at a packet error rate (PER) of 1 × 10⁻². Furthermore, by iterating between channel estimation and LDPC decoding, forming the proposed iterative burst-aware (IBA) decoding scheme, the gains increase to 1.5 dB and more than 3 dB, respectively. More importantly, the IBA scheme significantly improves robustness to bursty phase noise. Compared with conventional decoding, the IBA scheme can reduce both BER and PER by up to three orders of magnitude under severe bursty phase noise.