Codec design for turbo coding scheme

Abstract

Turbo codes, a new class of concatenated convolutional codes, is considered as one of the most fascinating channel coding schemes. It is capable of achieving near theoretical error correction performance over an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. The crucial part of the turbo decoder is the Soft-In/Soft-Output (SISO) decoders. So the focus of this thesis is to explore the characteristics, performances and design issues of the two main classes of SISO decoders: Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) decoder, Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (SOVA) decoder and their variants. These issues are very important for the design and implementation of a practical turbo codec.