Performance Analysis of Turbo Decoding Algorithms in Wireless OFDM Systems

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance and complexity of Max-Log-MAP and SOVA decoding algorithms for turbo codes in OFDM wireless systems, evaluating their suitability for implementation in user terminals under realistic conditions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of two low-complexity turbo decoding algorithms for OFDM systems, assessing their performance trade-offs for practical wireless applications.

Findings

Max-Log-MAP and SOVA algorithms show comparable error correction performance.

Simulation results highlight the trade-off between decoding complexity and error rate.

Algorithms are suitable for implementation in cost-efficient wireless terminals.

Abstract

Turbo codes are well known to be one of the error correction techniques which achieve closer results to the Shannon limit. Nevertheless, the specific performance of the code highly depends on the particular decoding algorithm used at the receiver. In this sense, the election of the decoding algorithm involves a trade off between the gain introduced by the code and the complexity of the decoding process. In this work we perform a thorough analysis of the different iterative decoding techniques and analyze their suitability for being implemented in the user terminals of new cellular and broadcast systems which are based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The analyzed iterative decoding algorithms are the Max-Log-MAP and the soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA), since both of them have a relative low computational complexity, simplifying their implementation in cost efficient terminals. Simulation results have been obtained for different encoder structures, block sizes and considering realistic channel conditions (an OFDM transmission over a wireless channel).