Turbo Code Design for Short Blocks

This work considers the design of short parallel turbo codes (PTC) with block lengths in the order of (a few) hundred code bits. In particular we aim at designing codes with large minimum distance. To this end a structured approach is presented to find suitable component code configurations, as well as interleavers. As a result the proposed turbo codes possess low error floors and outperform competing binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes by approximately 0.9dB and state-of-the-art binary turbo codes by 0.4dB at a code word error rate (CER) of about 10^{-7}. The loss w.r.t to the random coding bound (RCB) is only about 0.8dB