Turbo and Turbo-Like Codes: Principles and Applications in Telecommunications

For decades, the de facto standard for forward error correction was a convolutional code decoded with the Viterbi algorithm, often concatenated with another code (e.g., a Reed-Solomon code). But since the introduction of turbo codes in 1993, much more powerful codes referred to collectively as turbo and turbo-like codes have eclipsed classical methods. These powerful error-correcting techniques achieve excellent error-rate performance that can closely approach Shannon's channel capacity limit. The lure of these large coding gains has resulted in their incorporation into a widening array of telecommunications standards and systems. This paper will briefly characterize turbo and turbo-like codes, examine their implications for physical layer system design, and discuss standards and systems where they are being used. The emphasis will be on telecommunications applications, particularly wireless, though others are mentioned. Some thoughts on the use of turbo and turbo-like codes in the future will also be given.