On the performance of turbo codes and convolutional codes of low rate

Recently two new classes of low-rate codes have been presented. The first class is the super-orthogonal turbo codes (SOTCs) and the second is the maximum free distance (MFD) convolutional codes. In this paper we present an evaluation of the performance vs. arithmetic decoding complexity for these codes and compare them with the previously reported super-orthogonal convolutional codes (SOCCs). For all classes of codes, the arithmetic decoding complexity is estimated, and the error performance on the additive white Gaussian noise channel is simulated. The SOCCs offer performance comparable to that of the MFD codes. However, the existence of good SOCCs is restricted to a small number of rates while the MFD codes give high performance for a multitude of rates. For the parameters used in this investigation the SOTCs yield higher performance at lower arithmetic decoding complexity than the MFD codes