System design considerations for the use of turbo codes in aeronautical satellite communications

Turbo codes have performance that approaches the Shannon limit. The key to this near-optimum performance lies in the iterated decoding of the received data stream. Turbo codes are a superset of block and convolutional codes familiar to most digital communications engineers. Despite their obvious advantages, however, turbo codes do have some limitations that make them more or less suited to specific applications. This paper examines the utility of turbo codes for aeronautical satellite communications. A brief introduction to turbo code principles is followed by a high level examination of turbo code and presentation of simple examples of turbo code applications to aeronautical communications.