Decoding in the presence of ISI without interleaving ORBGRAND AI

Abstract: Inter symbol interference (ISI), which occurs in a wide variety of channels, is a result of time dispersion. It can be mitigated by equalization which results in noise coloring. For such colored noise, we propose a decoder called Ordered Reliability Bit Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (ORBGRANDAI) which is inspired by the development of approximate independence in statistical physics. By foregoing interleaving, ORBGRAND-AI can deliver the same, or lower, block error rate (BLER) for the same amount of energy per information bit in an ISI channel as a state-of-the-art soft input decoder, such as Cyclic Redundancy Check Assisted-Successive Cancellation List (CA-SCL) decoding, with an interleaver. To assess the decoding performance of ORBGRAND-AI, we consider delay tap models and their associated colored noise. In particular, we examine a two-tap dicode ISI channel as well as an ISI channel derived from data from RFView, a physics-informed modeling and simulation tool. We investigate the dicode and RFView channel under a variety of imperfect channel state information assumptions and show that a second order autoregressive model adequately represents the RFView channel effect.