An overview of turbo codes and their applications

More than ten years after their introduction, turbo Codes are now a mature technology that has been rapidly adopted for application in many commercial transmissions systems. This paper provides an overview of the basic concepts employed in convolutional and block turbo codes, and review the major evolutions in the field with an emphasis on practical issues such as implementation complexity and high-rate circuit architectures. We address the use of these technologies in existing standards and also discuss future potential applications for this error-control coding technology