Development of a universal turbo codec and its performance characteristics

A flexible, configurable turbo codec engine for both military and commercial applications has recently been developed at Titan Systems under a jointly funded dual use science and technology (DUS&T) program sponsored by the US Army CECOM. Results indicate that the universal turbo codec (UTC) provides 2-4 dB of performance improvement over standard convolutional codes and greater than 1 dB improvement over turbo product codes. The performance, configuration, features and implementation of the UTC using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware is described.