We propose a new class of information-coupled (IC) Turbo codes to improve the
transport block (TB) error rate performance for long-term evolution (LTE)
systems, while keeping the hybrid automatic repeat request protocol and the
Turbo decoder for each code block (CB) unchanged. In the proposed codes, every
two consecutive CBs in a TB are coupled together by sharing a few common
information bits. We propose a feed-forward and feed-back decoding scheme and a
windowed (WD) decoding scheme for decoding the whole TB by exploiting the
coupled information between CBs. Both decoding schemes achieve a considerable
signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gain compared to the LTE Turbo codes. We construct
the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions for the LTE Turbo codes and
our proposed IC Turbo codes from the EXIT functions of underlying convolutional
codes. An SNR gain upper bound of our proposed codes over the LTE Turbo codes
is derived and calculated by the constructed EXIT charts. Numerical results
show that the proposed codes achieve an SNR gain of 0.25 dB to 0.72 dB for
various code parameters at a TB error rate level of 10−2, which complies
with the derived SNR gain upper bound.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure