A new short memory turbo code with good BER performance and low decoding complexity

A new rate 1/2 turbo code with short memory 2 is developed in this paper. The proposed turbo code consists of two 4-state parallel concatenated non-punctured systematic rate-2/3 convolutional codes. Using a modified maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding algorithm working on dual codes, its bit error rate (BER) performance is comparable to that of the classic 16-state turbo code at short block lengths, such as k=1024, while its decoding complexity is less than 1/8 that of the classic 16-state turbo codes; for information block length k=504, its BER performance is better than that of the (1008, 3, 6) LDPC codes with comparable decoding complexity. The dual code decoding algorithm is intrinsically partial parallel and a considerably higher throughput of the turbo decoder can be obtained compared with classic turbo codes consisting of punctured codes. The simulation results show that the proposed turbo code can be a competitive technique for short block length applications.