A very general family of turbo-codes: the multi-non-binary turbo-codes [articol]

Abstract

This paper presents a new family of turbo codes whose the constituent codes have R ≥ 1 non-binary inputs and R+1 outputs. We refer this family as the multi input non-binary turbo codes (MNBTC), which is very general. More specifically, we show that this family includes the multi-binary turbo-codes (MBTCs) that themselves include the classical binary turbo-codes (BTCs). Moreover, it also includes the turbo-codes with Reed Solomon codes as constituent codes. In this paper, we fully describe the encoding process and the extension of the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) decoding algorithm, especially the trellis closing issues for these codes. Additionally, we show by simulations the benefit of using this family of Turbo-codes.