An interactive concatenated turbo coding system

This paper presents a concatenated turbo coding system in which a Reed-Solomon outer code is concatenated with a binary turbo inner code. In the proposed system, the outer code decoder and the inner turbo code decoder interact to achieve both good bit error and frame error performance. The outer code decoder helps the inner turbo code decoder to terminate its decoding iteration while the inner turbo code decoder provides soft-output information to the outer code decoder to carry out a reliability-based algebraic soft-decision decoding algorithm. In the case that outer code decoding fails, the outer code decoder instructs the inner code decoder to continue its decoding iterations until outer code decoding is successful or a preset maximum number of decoding iterations is reached. This interaction between outer and inner code decoders reduces decoding delay.