BER performance of turbo coded multi-hop networks using iterative channel information estimation scheme

In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance of turbo coded multi-route multi-hop networks is presented. Multi-hop networks have received much attention in recent years because of their large channel capacity. When the information bit streams are transmitted over multiple routes, a route diversity effect would also be possible. In order to improve the route diversity effect the receiver side should carry out the decoding process taking route conditions for each route into account. However, it is difficult for the receiver side to know the condition of the whole of a route because of multi-hopping. To cope with this problem, the system dealt with in this paper uses a channel information estimation scheme that exploits the number of error-corrected bits in the decoding process to estimate the route condition. The BER performance is investigated by computer simulations under an additive white gaussian noise and a flat Rayleigh fading environment. As the result, the channel information estimation scheme works well in Rayleigh fading environment as well. The advantage of this estimation scheme is that it needs no parity check bits that are indispensable in the conventional scheme.