Turbo decoding enhancement studies in satellite communications

Modern satellite communication systems require high-rate, accurate and reliable transmission in the presence of hostile environments. These requirements present a major challenge. To meet this challenge, we are presenting a simple enhancement of the turbo decoding algorithm which will significantly improve the end-to-end channel performance. Herein, we present an improved max-log-MAP turbo decoding in which the branch metrics are weight by a single scaling factor. The enhanced max-log-MAP decoder can provide a significant BER performance over the conventional max-log-MAP by improvement in the extrinsic information calculation. With negligible increase in complexity, this enhancement has significant advantage for advanced satellite communication applications.