Irregular Turbo Codes in Block-Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper investigates irregular turbo codes over block-fading channels, extending channel multiplexers for these codes, and demonstrates their near-outage performance compared to theoretical limits.

Contribution

It introduces an extension of channel multiplexers for irregular turbo codes and shows their effectiveness in non-ergodic block-fading channels.

Findings

Irregular turbo codes perform close to outage probability on block-fading channels.

Extended multiplexers improve code performance over non-ergodic channels.

Decoding thresholds are small and comparable to ergodic Gaussian-noise channels.

Abstract

We study irregular binary turbo codes over non-ergodic block-fading channels. We first propose an extension of channel multiplexers initially designed for regular turbo codes. We then show that, using these multiplexers, irregular turbo codes that exhibit a small decoding threshold over the ergodic Gaussian-noise channel perform very close to the outage probability on block-fading channels, from both density evolution and finite-length perspectives.