Abstract
Turbo codes are the most exciting and potentially important development in coding theory in recent years. They were introduced in 1993 by Berrou, Glavieux and $Thitimajshima,({(1)}$ and claimed to achieve near Shannon-limit error correction performance with relatively simple component codes and large interleavers. A required Eb/N0 of 0.7㏈ was reported for BER of $10^{-5}$ and code rate of $l/2.^{(1)}$ However, to implement the turbo code system, there are various important details that are necessary to reproduce these results such as AGC gain control, optimal wordlength determination, and metric rescaling. Further, the memory required to implement MAP-based turbo decoder is relatively considerable. In this paper, we confirmed the accuracy of these claims by computer simulation considering these points, and presented a optimal wordlength for Turbo code design. First, based on the analysis and simulation of the turbo decoder, we determined an optimal wordlength of Turbo decoder. Second, we suggested the MAP decoding algorithm based on sliding-window method which reduces the system memory significantly. By computer simulation, we could demonstrate that the suggested fixed-point Turbo decoder operates well with negligible performance loss.