Performance Evaluation of Turbo Coded OFDM Systems and Application of Turbo Decoding for Impulsive Channel

A comparison of the performance of hard and soft-decision turbo coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing systems with Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) and 16-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16-QAM) is considered in the first section of this paper. The results show that the soft-decision method greatly outperforms the hard-decision method. The complexity of the demapper is reduced with the use of simplified algorithm for 16-QAM demapping. In the later part of the paper, we consider the transmission of data over additive white class A noise (AWAN) channel, using turbo coded QPSK and 16-QAM systems. We propose a novel turbo decoding scheme for AWAN channel. Also we compare the performance of turbo coded systems with QPSK and 16-QAM on AWAN channel with two different channel values- one computed as per additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel conditions and the other as per AWAN channel conditions. The results show that the use of appropriate channel value in turbo decoding helps to combat the impulsive noise more effectively. The proposed model for AWAN channel exhibits comparable Bit error rate (BER) performance as compared to AWGN channel.