convolutional tuRbo codes on aWgn and flat Rayleigh fading channels

Vol. 106 No. 9/10 Page 1 of 11 ABSTRACT Repeat-punctured turbo codes, an extension of the conventional turbo-coding scheme, has shown a significant increase in bit-error rate performance at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios for short frame lengths. Superorthogonal convolutional turbo codes (SCTC) makes use of superorthogonal signals to improve the performance of the conventional turbo codes and a coding scheme that applies the repeat-punctured technique into SCTC has shown to perform better. We investigated two new low-rate coding schemes, repeat-punctured superorthogonal convolutional turbo codes (RPSCTC) and dual-repeat-punctured superorthogonal convolutional turbo codes (DRPSCTC), that make use of superorthogonal signaling, together with repetition and puncturing, to improve the performance of SCTC for reliable and effective communications. Simulation results in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading channel are presented together with analytical bounds of bit error probabilities, derived from transfer function bounding techniques. From the simulation results and the analytical bounds presented, it is evident that RPSCTC and DRPSCTC offer a more superior performance than SCTC in the AWGN channel, as well as in flat Rayleigh non-line-of-sight fading channels. The distance spectrum is also presented for the new schemes and accounts for the performance improvement rendered in simulations. It is important to note that the improved performance that SCTC, and consequently RPSCTC and DRPSCTC, exhibit is achieved at the expense of bandwidth expansion and complexity and would be ideal for power-limited satellite communication links or interference-limited systems.