Turbo Codes Construction for Robust Hybrid Multitransmission Schemes

In certain applications the user has to cope with some random packet erasures due, e.g., to deep fading conditions on wireless links, or to congestion on wired networks. In other applications, the user has to cope with a pure wireless link, in which all packets are available to him, even if seriously corrupted. The ARQ/FEC schemes already studied and presented in the literature are well optimized only for one of these two applications. In a previous work, the authors aimed at bridging this gap, giving a design method for obtaining hybrid ARQ schemes that perform well in both conditions, i.e., at the presence of packet erasures and packet fading. This scheme uses a channel coding system based on partially-systematic periodically punctured turbo codes. Since the computation of the transfer function and, consequently, the union bound on the Bit or Frame Error Rate of a partiallysystematic punctured turbo code becomes highly intensive as the interleaver size and the puncturing period increase, in this work a simplified and more efficient method to calculate the most significant terms of the average distance spectrum of the turbo encoder is proposed and validated

Impact of Segmentation and Capture on Slotted Aloha Systems Exploiting Interference Cancellation

The performance of the widely adopted slotted Aloha (SA) scheme has been recently improved thanks to the introduction of novel mechanisms, including interference cancellation (IC), packet segmentation, and slot slicing. The combined effect of these mechanisms in the presence of capture has however not yet deeply investigated, even if the resulting impact on the network behavior is determinant for properly quantifying the achievable throughput. To deal with this issue, this paper analyzes the influence of capture on a framed SA (FSA) system adopting IC, segmentation, and slicing, by considering a reliable decoding criterion that accounts for the actually experienced signal to interference-plus-noise ratio. A theoretical model is developed to evaluate the capture probability in fast and slow Rayleigh fading conditions, deriving closed-form expressions for the interference-limited case. The IC-based FSA throughput is then estimated adopting a Markov chain approach validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the performance of an actual system using a quadrature phase-shift keying modulation in conjunction with a turbo encoder is compared with that estimated by adopting the considered decoding criterion, in order to check its applicability to practical communication networks