Serial concatenation of interleaved codes: analytical performance bounds

Parallel concatenated coding schemes employing convolutional codes as constituent codes linked by an interleaver have been proposed in the literature as “turbo codes”. They yield very good performance in connection with simple suboptimum decoding algorithms. In this paper, we propose an alternative scheme consisting of the serial concatenation of block or convolutional codes and evaluate its average performance in terms of analytical bounds on the bit error probability. Comparisons with parallel concatenated coding schemes show in some cases sensible advantages