Distributed turbo codes: towards the capacity of the relay channel

A novel coding technique is proposed for the relay channel. The source broadcasts a recursive convolutional code to both relay and destination. After detecting the data broadcasted by the source, the relay interleaves and re-encodes the message prior to forwarding it to the destination. Because the destination receives both codes in parallel, a distributed turbo code is embedded in the relay channel. Simulation results show that the proposed code performs close to the information-theoretic bound on outage event probability of decode-and-forward relaying.