Soft-In-Soft-Out decoder based on single parity check for turbo code

Abstract

Turbo codes have attracted a great deal of interest around the world since their discovery in 1993. The main reason is the possibility to attain the ultimate limits of the capacity of a communication channel. This dissertation describes the main concepts on which turbo codes are based, which are concatenated coding and iterative coding. This later is the 'real' turbo principle, which is the real secret of their remarkable performance. This dissertation also shows that using log-likelihood algebra, any decoder which accepts soft inputs can be used as turbo decoder.