Optimal channel code parameter selection for hardware efficient OFDM systems

An efficient and hardware economic channel coding technique is essential in high-speed mobile communication systems. The channel coding parameters will have a large impact on the system performance (data rate and bit error rate) and also on the hardware development in terms of area consumption and timing behaviour. Therefore, important system parameters like code rate, constraint length and Viterbi decoding strategy (single state or best state and the resulting truncation depth for both strategies) have to be decided early in the design flow. The objective of this paper is to discuss the technical tradeoff (system performance and hardware cost) when choosing the channel coding parameters for a system with convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding. For a wide range of possible channel coding parameters the impact on the system performance and on hardware consumptions, which have been acquired from field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations, are discussed and compared.