In designing a wireless communication transceiver, the main objective is to achieve high-speed high-spectral-efficient data transmission with low error probability. Therefore, powerful channel coding is a major requirement in such a harsh wireless environment. Recently a novel class of parallel concatenated recursive convolutional codes called turbo-codes has attracted great attention by its surprising error correcting capability. In this thesis, we study the performance of turbo-codes in a wireless environment....[ Read more ]

In designing a wireless communication transceiver, the main objective is to achieve high-speed high-spectral-efficient data transmission with low error probability. Therefore, powerful channel coding is a major requirement in such a harsh wireless environment. Recently a novel class of parallel concatenated recursive convolutional codes called turbo-codes has attracted great attention by its surprising error correcting capability. In this thesis, we study the performance of turbo-codes in a wireless environment.

In order to achieve high spectral efficiency, turbo-codes with multilevel modulation (turbo-TCM) are utilized. We simulated turbo-TCM in a frequency selective fading channel with two kinds of the time delay spread profiles, namely, the equal-amplitude two-ray profile and the one-sided exponential profile. It is found that turbo-TCM achieves unmatched performance of average irreducible BER compared to the conventional TCM, especially in channels with high delay spread (i.e., strong intersymbol interference). Therefore, it suggests that high-speed high-spectral-efficient data transmission in a wireless environment can be achieved by utilizing turbo-TCM.

Wireless multimedia is being discussed actively among researchers and developers. Powerful and effective channel coding is necessary for high quality image and video transmission through a wireless environment. To see an application of turbo-codes, we study its performance for the transmission of compressed images over a flat Rayleigh fading channel and a frequency selective fading channel. We find that the excellent error correcting capability, the iterative decoding scheme and the soft channel information utilization of turbo-codes are especially suitable for compressed image transmission. In addition, a joint source/channel coding scheme and an unequal error protection (UEP) are also studied in this thesis. A lot of simulation results are presented and compared with a soft decision convolutional code.