Turbo decoding using two soft output values

It is well known that turbo decoding always begins from the first component decoder and supposes that the apriori information is 0 at the first iterative decoding. To alternatively start decoding at two component decoders, we can gain two soft output values for the received observation of an input bit. It is obvious that two soft output values comprise more sufficient extrinsic information than only one output value obtained in the conventional scheme since different start points of decoding result in different combinations of the apriori information and the input codewords with different symbol orders due to the permutation of an interleaver. Summarizing two soft output values for every bit before making hard decisions, we can correct more errors due to their complement. Consequently, turbo codes can achieve better error correcting performance than before in this way. Simulation results show that the performance of turbo codes using the novel proposed decoding scheme can get a growing improvement with the increment of SNR in general compared to the conventional scheme. When the bit error probability is 10-5, the proposed scheme can achieve 0.5 dB asymptotic coding gain or so under the given simulation conditions.EI中国科学引文数据库(CSCD)03237-2401