Performance comparison of convolutional and block turbo codes for WLAN applications

Turbo codes have become an important branch on channel coding research due to their exceptional performance on forward error correcting. They are based on concatenated codes and iterative decoding, where Soft Input/Soft Output (SISO) decoders produce an information refinement in each iteration. In this paper we apply turbo coding for different operating modes, based on the Hiperlan2 and IEEE 802.11a standards (third generation of WALNs). We studied the flexibility of two turbo coding schemes (Block Turbo Codes and Convolutional Turbo Codes) when applied to targeted block sizes and code rates. For BTCs, high rate and small blocks were found when concatenating a BCH code with a single parity check bit. Experimental results showed that each coding scheme outperforms the other depending on the targeted BER.