L. Lin et al., Comparison of convolutional and turbo codes for OFDM with antenna diversity in high-bit-rate wireless applications, IEEE COMM L, 4(9), 2000, pp. 277-279
This letter presents simulation results for the application of Turbo coding
to an OFDM system with diversity. First, results are presented for convolu
tional and Reed-Solomon codes. It is shown that even with short constraint
lengths, convolutional codes have the potential to outperform Reed-Solomon
codes, provided that sufficient precision is used in the soft decoder. We t
hen evaluate the performance of Turbo codes under slow fading conditions an
d study the effects of varying codeword size. Increasing codeword size theo
retically provides better interleaving between the two component codes. How
ever, this advantage is less clear when the fading rate is significantly lo
wer than the symbol rate, which is typical of the high-data-rate systems co
nsidered here. Under such conditions, the advantage of using two component
convolutional codes in Turbo codes is limited, A single convolutional code
with a long constraint length may be a better choice.