Serially concatenated turbo codes

The paper presents a new scheme of concatenated codes, referred to as serially concatenated turbo (SCT) codes. The code is constructed as the serial combinations of two turbo codes, i.e. turbo recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) codes and turbo Bose Ray Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, linked by a pseudo-random interleaver. In comparison with the conventional turbo RSC codes, SCT codes have higher minimum distance values. Based on conducted simulations, it is found that SCT codes outperform turbo RSC codes at the waterfall and error floor regions, while they require reasonable number of iterations at their iterative decoding structure to achieve good performance.