Performance Analysis of High Throughput MAP Decoder for Turbo Codes and Self Concatenated Convolutional Codes

The effect of parallelism on Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of Turbo Code (TC) and Self Concatenated Convolutional Code (SECCC) with different levels of parallelism and frame sizes is investigated. Next Iteration Initialization (NII) method is employed for mitigating the BER degradation resulting from increased parallelism. In order to analyze and compare the architectural performance of both schemes, this paper presents the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) design of Maximum Aposteriori Probability (MAP) decoder for TC and SECCC, both employing the same constituent code. The simulation results show that for BER of 10
^-4
, without parallelism, TC is 0.4 dB superior to SECCC, whereas, with parallelism of 64, the difference in performance between both schemes reduces to 0.25 dB. It is found that SECCC outperforms TC for frame sizes less than or equal to 2048 bits, when invoking a parallelism of 16, 32 and 64. The BER performance of both schemes shows that SECCC outperforms TC at parallelism of 256 by 0.3 dB at BER of 10
^-4
. Hence, for high throughput architectures employing higher parallelism (beyond 64 and 128) without significant degradation in BER performance, SECCC performs better than TC. The synthesis results of VHDL design of the MAP decoder obtained using Xilinx ISE verify that both schemes have equal clock frequency and resource consumption. It is demonstrated that the MAP decoder achieves the clock frequency of 86.3 MHz which is capable of producing a throughput of 691 Mbps using parallelism of 64.