Performance of Non-Binary RS-Turbo Concatenated Codes

In this paper the encoder structure of non-binary turbo codes is presented and the symbol-by-symbol log-MAP decoding algorithm is analyzed in detail. A new scheme of RS-turbo concatenated codes is designed which includes an RS code (255,239,8) and a non-binary Turbo code built from two RSC component codes with m=2 inputs. The simulations were made for frame length N=2048 bits and for the maximum iteration number of 8. The AWGN channel and the BPSK modulation were employed. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the BER performance at high SNR and reduce the iteration number compared to the conventional non-binary turbo code. Furthermore, the concatenated RS code can supply a simple stopping criterion for Turbo iterative decoding.