EXIT Charts for PUM Woven Turbo Codes

Abstract

Partial Unit Memory (PUM) codes are a class of low complexity, non-binary convolutional codes and have been shown recently to outperform equivalent convolutional codes. We present the Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts of parallel concatenated PUM codes and PUM Woven Turbo Codes and analyse them to assess their performance compared with well-known turbo codes used by the third generation mobile UMTS standard. The EXIT chart analysis is supported by Bit Error Rate (BER) plots. We show that the concatenated PUM codes outperform the well-known turbo codes in the error floor region, with comparable performance in the waterfall region.