Performance analysis of punctured convolutional codes and turbo-codes

Digital radio transmission techniques offer the prospect of improved reception compared with analogue signals and are being introduced for radio broadcasting in the short-wave bands. The coding scheme adopted plays an important part in achieving a high quality in the presence of noise and fading, which can be particularly severe for Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) receivers. This paper compares the performance of turbo-codes and punctured convolutional codes over the radio broadcast transmission channels proposed in ITU-R Circular Letter 10/LCCE/39. The results show that the bit error ratio for binary communication over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels is low for turbo-codes in comparison with that for punctured convolutional codes having the same code rate. This result holds over a wide range of bit energy to noise power ratios. The results, which are evaluated in terms of the efficiency for Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channels, show that system efficiency increases with decreasing code rate.