A study on the performance, power consumption tradeoffs of short frame turbo decoder design

Protecting short frames using turbo coding is a challenging task because of the small interleave size and the need for transmission efficiency. We explore possible trade-off between power consumption (estimated by the average number of iterations) and performance of turbo decoders when short frame turbo codes are used. Three encoding/decoding schemes are proposed to improve performance of turbo decoder in terms of frame/bit error rate, and to increase the data transmission efficiency whether ARQ protocols are performed or not. Specifically, turbo decoding metrics aided short CRC codes are applied to terminated trellis codes, tail-biting encoded trellis codes and CRC embedded trellis codes with a two-fold purpose: to stop the iterative decoding processes and to detect decoding errors at the last iteration. We show that significant coding gains can be achieved by actually increasing the coding rate with negligible increase in power consumption. Performance improvement is demonstrated over both AWGN and Rayleigh flat fading channels.