Distributed Turbo Coding with Soft Information Relaying in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed turbo coding (DTC) scheme for wireless sensor networks. In the proposed scheme, rather than making a decision on the transmitted information symbols at the relay as in the conventional DTC, the relay calculates and forwards the corresponding soft information. The proposed scheme can effectively overcome error propagation due to erroneous decoding at the relay, thus significantly outperforming the conventional DTC with imperfect decoding. At high signal to noise ratios (SNR), the proposed scheme can also approach the performance of the DTC with automatic repeat request (ARQ) and achieve much higher throughput than the latter.