Performance of 2D SOVA along and across track in shingled magnetic recording media

Serial Concatenation of Two Dimensional Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (2D-SOVA) and regular Viterbi Algorithm (VA) for 2D equalisation and detection of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) media provides excellent performance as compared to the use of 1 Dimensional (1D) maximum likelihood detector. In this paper, we implement and evaluate the performances of two versions of it. The first version performs 2D SOVA along the tracks to eliminate the effect of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and then the Viterbi detector across the tracks to remove inter-track interference (ITI). The second version carries out 2D-SOVA across the tracks and VA along the tracks. The results for high ITI and ISI show a better performance when using 2D-SOVA across the track with a small difference in computational complexity in favour of 2D-SOVA across the tracks.