Turbo-codes have attracted an explosion of interest since their discovery in 1993: for the first time, the gap with the limits predicted by information and coding theory was on the way to be bridged. The astonishing performance of turbo-codes relies on two major concepts: code concatenation so as to build a powerful global code, and iterative decoding in order to efficiently approximate the optimal decoding process. As a matter of fact, the techniques involved in turbo coding and in the associated iterative decoding strategy can be generalized to other problems frequently encountered in digital communications. This results in a so-called turbo principle. A famous application of the latter principle is the communication scheme referred to as turbo-equalization: when considering coded transmission over a frequency-selective channel, it enables to jointly and efficiently perform the equalization and decoding tasks required at the receiver. This leads by the way to significant performance improvement with regard to conventional disjoint approaches. In this context, the purpose of the present thesis is the derivation and the performance study of novel digital communication receivers, which perform iterative joint detection and decoding by means of the turbo principle. The binary turbo-equalization scheme is considered as a starting point, and improved in several ways, which are detailed throughout this work. Emphasis is always put on the performance analysis of the proposed communication systems, so as to reach insight about their behavior. Practical considerations are also taken into account, in order to provide realistic, tractable, and efficient solutions.

In general, ultra wideband (UWB) signals are transmitted using ~'eIYshort pulses m tiIae domain, thus promising very high data rates. In this thesis, a recei'ler structure is proposed for decoding multiuser information data in a convolutionally coded UWB system. The proposed iterative receiver has three stages: a pulse detector, a symbol detector, and a channel decoder. Each of these stages outputs soft values, which are used as a priori information in the next iteration. Simulation results show that the proposed system can provide performance very close to a single-user system. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / "July 2006." / Incluldes bibliographic references (leaves 29-31)