Approaching Shannon's capacity limit by 0.2 dB using simple Hamming codes

The authors show that the Shannon capacity limit for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel can be approached within 0.27 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 10/sup -5/ by applying long but simple Hamming codes as component codes to an iterative turbo-decoding scheme. In general, the complexity of soft-in/soft-out decoding of binary block codes is rather high. However, the application of a neurocomputer in combination with a parallelization of the decoding rule facilitates an implementation of the decoding algorithm in the logarithmic domain which requires only matrix additions and multiplications. But the storage requirement might still be quite high depending on the interleavers used.