Spatially-Coupled Faster-Than-Nyquist Signaling: A Joint Solution to Detection and Code Design

In this paper, we investigate two important issues of faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling, namely, reduced-complexity detection and code design. Different from previous works, we consider these two issues jointly by designing a scheme that increases the minimum squared Euclidean distance of FTN signaling via repetition coding at a cost of an increased complexity. Furthermore, to reduce the rate loss of the repetition, we adopt the idea of spatially-coupling from coding theory to FTN signaling, and the resultant signaling scheme is therefore referred to as spatially-coupled faster-than-Nyquist (SC-FTN) signaling. The signal of SC-FTN signaling is generated in a continuous manner by interleaving and repeating the coded FTN signals and a graph-based iterative sliding-window detector is applied for signal detection. Both bounding and extrinsic information transfer chart analysis are provided to study the error-floor and convergence performances of SC-FTN signaling. These analyses unveil the intrinsic relationship between error floor, decoding threshold, and detection/decoding complexity, which provides guidelines for the designs of practical systems. Simulation results show that the promising error performance can be achieved with a simple FTN detection, where the bit error rate performance of coded SC-FTN signaling outperforms that of state-of-the-art coded FTN systems and the capacity of Nyquist signaling.