Realization of a windowed BCJR algorithm

In contemporary communication systems, Turbo coding is an important channel coding method which results in extremely low bit-error ratios (BER) at signal-tonoise ratios (SNRs) within 1 dB off the Shannon Limit. The BCJR algorithm is used as an iterative decoding scheme in Turbo coding. However, it requires that the whole input sequence is received possible including termination. This makes it difficult to be used in a continuous input stream. The current thesis presents a possible realization of the windowed BCJR algorithm, which overcomes this problem, and can be introduced into a pipelined turbo decoding scheme. In decoding the turbo codes, the sliding window BCJR algorithm, derived from the BCJR algorithm, permits a continuous decoding of the coded sequence without requiring trellis termination of the constituent codes and uses a reduced memory span.