Analysis of iteration control for turbo decoders in turbo synchronization applications

Abstract. Wireless data transmission results in frequency and phase offsets of the signal in the receiver. In addition, the received symbols are corrupted by noise. Therefore, synchronization and channel coding are vital parts of each receiver in digital communication systems. By combining the phase and frequency synchronization with an advanced iterative channel decoder (inner loop) e.g. turbo codes in an iterative way (outer loop), the communications performance can be further increased. This principle is referred to as turbo synchronization. The energy consumption and the peak throughput of the system depend on the number of iterations for both loops. An advanced iteration control can decrease the mean number of needed iterations by detecting correctly decoded blocks. This leads to a dramatic energy saving or to an increase of throughput. In this paper we present a new stopping criterion for decodable blocks for turbo decoding in interrelation with turbo synchronization. Furthermore the implementation complexity of the turbo decoder is shown on a Xilinx FPGA.