Improving the performance of HF data link protocol using turbo codes

Shannon´s celebrated information theory results point out the existence of error control codes capable of correcting every error introduced by the channel as long as the information rate through the channel does not exceed its capacity. Among the many attempts to devise codec schemes capable of operating as close as possible to the capacity limit, concatenated codes have proven to be one of most effective techniques. The paper presents the application of concatenated coding (CC) schemes to the data link layer of HF radio networks. The emphasis of the work is on a class of CC called turbo codes. It is shown an improvement of more than 4 times in the throughput of the data link at E_b/N₀ of 5 dB.