A Simple and Efficient Method for Lowering the Error Floors of Turbo Codes that Use Structured Interleavers

A simple and efficient method for lowering the error floors of turbo codes that use structured interleavers is presented in this paper. This method identifies a set of parity bits that will be forced to take zero bit values when encoding, and exploits these known zero bit parities when decoding. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by its ability to significantly enhance Hamming distance spectra and thereby lowers error floors by several orders of magnitude; for example, using a rate-1/3 4-state single-binary turbo code with a packet of 1504 information bits, the packet error rate at the moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value of 1.4 dB is improved by about three orders of magnitude from 10-4 to 10-7.

[1]  Roberto Garello,et al.  Computing the free distance of turbo codes and serially concatenated codes with interleavers: algorithms and applications , 2001, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[2]  Claude Berrou,et al.  Designing good permutations for turbo codes: towards a single model , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37577).

[3]  Paul H. Siegel,et al.  Application of Distance Spectrum Analysis to Turbo Code Performance Improvement , 1997 .

[4]  Claude Berrou,et al.  Improving the distance properties of turbo codes using a third component code: 3D turbo codes - [transactions letters] , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[5]  A. Glavieux,et al.  Near Shannon limit error-correcting coding and decoding: Turbo-codes. 1 , 1993, Proceedings of ICC '93 - IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[6]  Paul Guinand,et al.  Estimating the minimum distance of large-block turbo codes using iterative multiple-impulse methods , 2007, Eur. Trans. Telecommun..

[7]  J. D. Andersen.  Turbo codes extended with outer BCH code , 1996 .

[8]  Gordon L. Stüber,et al.  List decoding of turbo codes , 1998, ICC '98. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Record. Affiliated with SUPERCOMM'98 (Cat. No.98CH36220).

[9]  Peter Kabal,et al.  Efficient distance measurement method for turbo codes that use structured interleavers , 2006, IEEE Communications Letters.

[10]  Youssouf Ould-Cheikh-Mouhamedou,et al.  Improving the Error Rate Performance of Turbo Codes using the Forced Symbol Method , 2007, IEEE Communications Letters.

[11]  Michel Jezequel,et al.  The Turbo Code Standard for DVB-RCS , 2004 .

[12]  Paul Guinand,et al.  Distance upper bounds and true minimum distance results for turbo-codes designed with DRP interleavers , 2005, Ann. des Télécommunications.