Transfer function bounds on the performance of turbo codes

Abstract

In this article we apply transfer function bounding techniques to obtain upper bounds on the bit-error rate for maximum likelihood decoding of turbo codes constructed with random permutations. These techniques are applied to two turbo codes with constraint length 3 and later extended to other codes. The performance predicted by these bounds is compared with simulation results. The bounds are useful in estimating the 'error floor' that is difficult to measure by simulation, and they provide insight on how to lower this floor. More refined bounds are needed for accurate performance measures at lower signal-to-noise ratios.