A Very General Family of Turbo-Codes: The Multi-Non- Binary Turbo-Codes

1 Facultatea de Electronică şi Telecomunicaţii, Departamentul Comunicaţii, Bd. V. Pârvan Nr. 2, 300223 Timişoara, e-mail [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] 2 Department of Electrical and Computer Eingineering, Rice University, MS-366 – 6100 Main Street, Huston, Texas 77005, e-mail [email protected] Universitatea Politehnica din Bucuresti, Facultatea de Electronică şi Telecomunicaţii si Teoria Informatie, 1-3 Iuliu Maniu, Bucuresti, e-mail [email protected] Abstract – This paper presents a new family of turbo codes whose the constituent codes have R≥1 non-binary inputs and R+1 outputs. We refer this family as the multi input non-binary turbo codes (MNBTC), which is very general. More specifically, we show that this family includes the multi-binary turbo-codes (MBTCs) that themselves include the classical binary turbo-codes (BTCs). Moreover, it also includes the turbo-codes with Reed Solomon codes as constituent codes. In this paper, we fully describe the encoding process and the extension of the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) decoding algorithm, especially the trellis closing issues for these codes. Additionally, we show by simulations the benefit of using this family of Turbo-codes.