The performance of turbo codes for wireless communication systems

Turbo codes play an important role in making communications systems more efficient and reliable. This paper provides a description of two turbo codes algorithms. Soft-output Viterbi algorithm and logarithmic-maximum a posteriori turbo decoding algorithms are the two candidates for decoding turbo codes. Soft-input soft-output (SISO) turbo decoder based on soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) and the logarithmic versions of the MAP algorithm, namely, Log-MAP decoding algorithm. The bit error rate (BER) performances of these algorithms are compared. Simulation results are provided for bit error rate performance using constraint lengths of K=3, over AWGN channel, show improvements of 0.4 dB for log-MAP over SOVA at BER 10^-4.