Reliable transmission with low complexity Reed-Solomon block turbo codes

Abstract

We show here that low complexity Reed-Solomon (RS) block turbo codes (BTC) based on Q-ary symbol and bit concatenation can both achieve reliable transmission at less than 1 dB from Shannon limit using quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. These near Shannon performances are due to a proper choice of RS component codes in the construction of RS product codes. RS-BTC based on Q-ary symbol concatenation has a great advantage in terms of block size over those based on bit concatenation. Compared to Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) BTC of similar code rate, its smaller memory size is worth noting from the practical point of view.