Impact of near Shannon-limit codes on wireless communications technology

Tremendous progress has been made on channel coding techniques during the last decade, starting from the invention of turbo codes and the rediscovery of the low-density parity check (LDPC) codes. These codes essentially closed the gap between the Shannon capacity limit and practical implementation. Commercial adoption of these new coding techniques, however, depends heavily on the introduction of the technology into communication standards. In this paper, we briefly review the considerations when turbo codes and LDPC codes were introduced to the 3^rd generation wireless standards (3GPP and 3GPP2), and the digital video broadcast for satellite standard (DVB-S2), respectively. We then examine a few possible approaches to take advantage of these powerful codes for future wireless channels.