Partition turbo decoding of linear block codes

Turbo codes, due to their novel coding and decoding techniques and remarkable performance, have attracted considerable interest since 1993. Especially, the turbo decoding principle has been successfully applied to solve many problems in digital communications. We consider how to use the turbo decoding principle to decode a general linear block code, and attempt to give a unified decoding method. It is shown that by partitioning a parity check matrix or a generator matrix of a linear block code, the code can be decoded using the turbo-decoding technique. Simulation results show that different partitions result in different error performance. To compare the error performance of a linear block code using different partitioning strategies, a concept called partition signal-to-noise ratio hierarchy is proposed. Based on this concept, several observations, which include some relating to classical turbo block codes, are given.