Information-Coupled Turbo Codes for LTE Systems

We propose a new class of information-coupled (IC) 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 a few common information bits. We propose a feed-forward and feed-back decoding scheme and a windowed (WD) decoding scheme for decoding the whole TB by exploiting the coupled information between CBs. Both decoding schemes achieve a considerable signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gain compared to the LTE Turbo codes. We construct the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions for the LTE Turbo codes and our proposed IC Turbo codes from the EXIT functions of underlying convolutional codes. An SNR gain upper bound of our proposed codes over the LTE Turbo codes is derived and calculated by the constructed EXIT charts. Numerical results show that the proposed codes achieve an SNR gain of 0.25 dB to 0.72 dB for various code parameters at a TB error rate level of $10^{-2}$, which complies with the derived SNR gain upper bound.