Partially Information-Coupled Turbo Codes for LTE Systems

We propose a new class of partially information-coupled (PIC) turbo codes to improve the transport block (TB) error rate performance for long-term evolution (LTE) systems, while keeping the hybrid automatic repeat request protocol and the turbo decoder for each code block (CB) unchanged. In the proposed codes, every two consecutive CBs in a TB are coupled together by sharing partial information bits. This coding structure introduces irregular variable node degree distributions in the Tanner graph of the PIC-turbo codes. We propose a feedforward and feedback decoding scheme and a windowed decoding scheme to decode the whole TB by exploiting the coupled information between CBs. We calculate the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions for the PIC-turbo codes by assuming that the coupled information are perfectly decoded. An SNR gain upper bound of the PIC-turbo codes over the LTE turbo codes for various coupling ratios is derived by the calculated EXIT charts. Numerical results show that the proposed codes achieve an SNR gain of 0.26–0.73 dB for various code parameters at a TB error rate level of $10^{-2}$ , which complies with the derived SNR gain upper bound.