Minimal trellis for systematic recursive convolutional encoders

We consider high-rate systematic recursive convolutional encoders to be adopted as constituent encoders in turbo schemes. It has been shown by Douillard and Berrou that the construction of high-rate turbo codes by means of high-rate constituent encoders offers several advantages over the typical construction based on the puncturing of rate-1/2 constituent encoders. To reduce the decoding complexity associated with high-rate codes, we adopt the “minimal” trellis representation of convolutional codes introduced by McEliece and Lin. While in the literature this trellis has been obtained for nonrecursive nonsystematic generator matrices, we herein introduce the construction of the “minimal” trellis for a systematic recursive convolutional encoding matrix. We also derive expressions for the arithmetic decoding complexity when the max-log-MAP algorithm is applied over the conventional and the “minimal” trellises. Examples are provided, which show that significant savings in decoding complexity are obtained, while keeping the same error performance of conventional schemes, when the minimal trellis is used. Finally, a code search is conducted and examples are provided which indicate that a refinement in terms of decoding complexity-error performance trade-off is obtained.