Performance of turbo codes over magnetic recording channels

We study the performance of turbo codes for magnetic recording channels using realistic channel models. The main objective is to provide a benchmark for the future studies on the subject. We examine a variety of schemes including the use of parallel concatenated turbo codes with and without turbo equalization and convolutional codes with an interleaver (can be regarded as a serial concatenation of convolutional codes with the partial response channel). We investigate the effect of the (turbo) code block length, the use of different code structures, and the effects of precoding and the media noise on the system performance. We assume that the partial response target is EPR4.