Turbo Coding for Satellite and Wireless Communications

The introduction of Turbo codes in 1993 was evidence of the attainability of the error correction performance bounds derived by Shannon in 1948. The original turbo codes consisted of two recursive convolutional codes concatenated in parallel and decoded using an iterative message passing algorithm consisting of two Maximum a posteriori Probability (MAP) decoders. The astounding performance of these codes resulted in a surge in the research activity in the area of concatenated codes and iterative decoding techniques. The idea was soon extended to other codes and code combinations as well as iterative schemes using different techniques in their iterations.