Turbo codes for nonuniform memoryless sources over noisy channels

This work addresses the problem of designing turbo codes for nonuniform binary memoryless or independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) sources over noisy channels. The extrinsic information in the decoder is modified to exploit the source redundancy in the form of nonuniformity; furthermore, the constituent encoder structure is optimized for the considered nonuniform i.i.d. source to further enhance the system performance. Some constituent encoders are found to substantially outperform Berrou´s (1996) (37, 21) encoder. Indeed, it is shown that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the newly designed turbo codes is greatly improved as significant coding gains are obtained.