A low-latency turbo decoding scheme for diversities-based communication systems

Abstract

Due to the superior error correction performance, Turbo Code has become one of the best choices to deal with errors induced from high-noise communication channels. Nevertheless, to achieve such a superior performance, it needs to repeat a probabilistic decoding operation over each corrupted data block for several times and thus exhibits considerable decoding latency. A decoding latency as such may forbid possible cost reduction on designing a communication receiver, especially when a strict round-trip latency is specified. This paper proposed a Turbo Decoding scheme which benefits from the diversity characteristic provisioned by some communication systems, and thus is able to efficiently reduce required decoding latency thereof. To verify the performance, the popular Max-Log-MAP algorithm has been cascaded with the proposed scheme and is simulated with a range of AWGN conditions. Possible alternatives to the proposed scheme are also presented while the trends of the resource utilization and the BER performance are presented and discussed. As the experimental result shows, the proposed Turbo decoding schemes can introduce at least 4x latency reduction comparing to the traditional scheme, while preserving an adequate decoding performance.