Performance analysis of turbo codes over Nakagami-m fading channels with impulsive noise

The statistical characteristics of impulsive noise differ greatly from those of Gaussian noise. Hence, the performance of conventional decoders, optimized for AWGN channels is not promising in non-Gaussian environments. In order to achieve improved performance in impulsive environments the decoder structure needs to be adapted in accordance with the impulsive noise model. This paper provides performance analysis of turbo codes over fully interleaved Nakagami-m fading channels with Middleton's additive white Class-A impulsive noise (MAWCAIN). Simulation results for memoryless Nakagami-m fading channels under coherent BPSK signaling are provided for the cases of ideal channel state information (ICSI) and no channel state information (NCSI) at the decoder. As in the 3GPP UMTS forward link an eight state turbo encoder having (1, 13/15, 13/15) generator polynomial is used throughout the analysis. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that this is an initial attempt to provide a detailed analysis of turbo codes over Nakagami-m fading channels with impulsive noise rather than fading channels with AWGN. © 2007 IEEE.