A Survey and Tutorial on Low-Complexity Turbo Coding Techniques and a Holistic Hybrid ARQ Design Example

Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) has become an essential error control technique in communication networks, which relies on a combination of arbitrary error correction codes and retransmissions. When combining turbo codes with HARQ, the associated complexity becomes a critical issue, since conventionally iterative decoding is immediately activated after each transmission, even though the iterative decoder might fail in delivering an error-free codeword even after a high number of iterations. In this scenario, precious battery-power would be wasted. In order to reduce the associated complexity, we will present design examples based on Multiple Components Turbo Codes (MCTCs) and demonstrate that they are capable of achieving an excellent performance based on the lowest possible memory octally represented generator polynomial (2, 3)_o. In addition to using low-complexity generator polynomials, we detail two further techniques conceived for reducing the complexity. Firstly, an Early Stopping (ES) strategy is invoked for curtailing iterative decoding, when its Mutual Information (MI) improvements become less than a given threshold. Secondly, a novel Deferred Iteration (DI) strategy is advocated for the sake of delaying iterative decoding, until the receiver confidently estimates that it has received sufficient information for successful decoding. Our simulation results demonstrate that the MCTC aided HARQ schemes are capable of significantly reducing the complexity of the appropriately selected benchmarkers, which is achieved without degrading the Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) and throughput.