Chapter 1

Introduction

Novel communication and information services are being introduced

almost daily and the demands for higher data rates and commu-
nication capacity continue to grow. This spectacular progress of
communication is to a great extent due to consistent performance
increase and cost reduction of devices and circuit technology. Such
advancements have also been fostered by major theoretical devel-
opments. The synergy between components and signal processing
techniques is considered to be the main cornerstone of modern com-
munication equipment.
This book is based on two theoretical discoveries that have had
a considerable impact on communication systems.
In the first one, Shannon established the fundamental limits on
the transmission rates in digital communication systems and mo-
tivated the search for coding techniques to approach the capacity
limit [3]. In another landmark development, Berrou, Glavieux and
Thitimajshima proposed turbo error control coding by which the
gap between the capacity limit and practically feasible channel uti-
lization is almost closed [4].
The emphasis in the book is on various aspects of encoding and
decoding algorithms, interleaver and code design and performance
analysis.
We start by outlining the structure of digital communication
systems and proceed by reviewing the channel capacity theorem
and its application to various error control coding schemes. Fur-

B. Vucetic et al., Turbo Codes

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2000
2 Introduction

thermore, basic principles of mathematical and trellis representa-

tion, encoding/decoding and performance analysis of block codes
are presented.

1.1 Digital Communication System

Structure
In order to understand the role of error control coding we present
a model of a general communication system, as shown in Fig. 1.1.

Inform-
ation r-- Source
r-- Encoder
Channel ---+- Modu-
Source Encoder lator
!
Channel

Data
Sink
+--
Source Channel Demodu-
Decoder f+- Decoder f+- lator
I
Fig. 1.1: Model of a digital communication system

The task of the transmitter in such a system is to transform the

information generated by a source into a form that can withstand
the effects of noise over the transmission medium.
An information source generates messages bearing information
to be transmitted. The messages can be words, code symbols etc.
The output of the information source is converted to a sequence of
symbols from a certain alphabet. Most often binary symbols are
transmitted.
The output of the information source is in general not suitable
for transmission as it might contain too much redundancy. For effi-
ciency reasons, the source encoder is designed to convert the source
output sequence into a sequence of binary digits with minimum re-
dundancy. If the source encoder generates rb bits per second (bps),
rb is called the data rate.