ISlT 2002, Lausanne, Switzerland,June 30 -July 5,2002

Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation Using Multiple Turbo Codes

Adrish Banerjee, Daniel J. Costello Jr., T h o m a s E. Fuja, a n d Peter C. Masseyl
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556.
{Banerjee .5, Costello.2 , tfuja, pmassey}Qnd. edu

Abstract - Bandwidth efficient coding schemes em- with a primitive 4-state [I code (P4-2parallel), a
ploying bit interleaved coded modulation and low primitive 8-state [l code (P8-2parallel), and a
complexity multiple turbo codes are investigated.
primitive 16-state [l 1 ~ ] code (P16-Zparallel)
~ ~ used ~ ~ ~
The BER performance of these designs is shown to be
superior to bit interleaved coded modulation schemes in a conventional (single interleaver) symmetric configuration
using conventional turbo codes. for the same blocksize and number of iterations.

I. INTRODUCTION

I
Turbo codes [l]are a class of binary error correcting codes
known to have very good performance for low signal-to-noise 10-
channel conditions. Bit interleaved coded modulation involves
combining a low rate binary channel code with a higher order
signal constellation for large spectral efficiencies.
Bit interleaved turbo coded modulation using identical
(symmetric) constituent encoders was first proposed by Le
Goff et. al. [Z]. These codes typically have good performance
in either the waterfall region or the error floor region of the
BER curve. Multiple turbo codes, with N 2. 3 constituent
encoders in parallel and N-1 interleavers [3], are capable of
achieving good performance for all SNR’s. In the next sec-
tion, we present examples of two such classes of codes, namely,
partially systematic multiple turbo codes and nonsystematic
2.7 2.8 2.9 3 31 3.2 33
multiple turbo codes, that achieve excellent performance with EPn\lgWJ
very low complexity.
Fig. 1: Comparison of various bit interleaved turbo coded mod-
11. MULTIPLETURBO
CODESBASEDDESIGNS ulation schemes.

using three 4-state (1 w]

We consider a multiple turbo code with two interleavers
Big Numerator-Accumulator
(BNA) constituent encoders. Puncturing half of the informa-
tion bits as well as half of the parity bits brings the overall
rate t o 1/2, which is then Gray mapped t o a 16-QAM signal
constellation to achieve a spectral efficiency of 2 bits/s/Hz.
Since only some of the information bits are actually transmit-
ted, this is referred t o as a partially systematic multiple turbo
code 141.
The multiple turbo code configuration can be expanded t o
include more than two interleavers. In one such scheme, if
no information bits are transmitted, a nonsystematic multi-
ple turbo code results [4]. One low complexity nonsystematic
multiple turbo code uses an asymmetric combination of four
2-state constituent encoders with three interleavers [4]. It em-
ploys a parallel concatenation of three accumulators (ACC) [l
+
- and one feedforward (FF) [l 1 D] encoder. Parity bits
are punctured to bring the overall code rate to 1/2.
Figure 1 shows the BER performance of the 2-state non-
systematic multiple turbo code (ACC-3, FF-4parallel) and
the 4-state partially systematic multiple turbo code (BNA-
3parallel), Gray mapped to a 16-QAM signal constellation,
for a blocksize of N=16384 symbols and 30 decoding itera-
tions on an AWGN channel. The performance is compared
‘This research was supported in part by NSF grant CCROO-
75514, NSF grant CCR-99-96222, NASA grant NAG5-10503, and
MIT Lincoln Laboratory grant CX-24535.
111. CONCLUSIONS
For high bandwidth efficiency, bit interleaved turbo coded
modulation schemes using multiple turbo codes allow us to
achieve low complexity and excellent BER performance. In
this paper, we have illustrated two new low complexity code
designs that use multiple turbo codes mapped to a 16-&AM
signal constellation for high bandwidth efficiency. The new
schemes give around 0.1-0.2 d B improvement over conven-
tional symmetric turbo codes in the waterfall region with less
decoding complexity.
REFERENCES
[I] C. Berrou and A. Glavieux, “Near optimum error correcting
and decoding: Turbo-codes,” in IEEE ‘Transactions on Com-
munications, vol. COM-44, pp. 1261-1271, Oct. 1996.
[2] S. Le Goff, A. Glavieux, and C. Berrou, “Turbo-codesand high
spectral efficiencymodulation,” in Proc. International Confer-
ence on Communications, (New Orleans, LA), pp. 645-649,
1994.
[3] D. Divsalar and F. Pollara, “Multiple turbo codes,” in Proc.
IEEE Military Communications Conference, (San Diego, CA),
pp. 279-285, NOV.1995.
[4] P. C. Massey and D. J. Costello Jr., “New low-complexity
turbo-like codes,” in Proc. IEEE Information Theory Work-
shop, (Cairns, Australia), pp. 70-72, Sept. 2001.

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