Dual-Repeat-Punctured Turbo Codes on AWGN channels

Turbo codes (TC) is a powerful branch of error-control coding that has exhibited performances close to the Shannon limit, whilst offering a reasonable level of computational complexity. Repeat-punctured turbo codes (RPTCs) exploit the fact that the use of larger interleavers correspond to better bit-error rate (BER) performances for the conventional turbo code, and makes use of repetition and puncturing to improve the performance of the conventional turbo code for moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Motivated by turbo codes and repeat-punctured turbo codes, we study the use of a new scheme, dual-repeat-punctured turbo codes (DRPTC) in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. DRPTCs primarily make use of repetition and puncturing and the structure of the conventional turbo code to yield a more superior performance. The decoding in principle follows the technique of turbo decoding but needs some changes to yield the performance improvement. Simulation results for the AWGN channel is presented together with the analytical union bounds derived from transfer-function bounding techniques, and the codeword distance-spectrum for the proposed scheme is presented and evaluated.