BER & FERTM SYNCHRONIZATION AND CHANNEL CODING—SUMMARY OF CONCEPT AND RATIONALEFigure 7-10 shows the simulated performance of Turbo codes of rates 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/6with an information block length of 16384 bits. These performance curves do not necessarilyreflect the performance of the <strong>CCSDS</strong> codes for this block length since the recommendedinterleaver for this block length has not been specified yet.10 -310 -410 -610 0 E b /N o (dB)Bock size = 1638410 -110 -2FERBERrate 1/3rate 1/6rate 1/210 -5rate 1/410 -710 -8-0 .4-0 .3-0 .2-0 .1-0 .00.10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.91.01.11.2Figure 7-10: BER and FER Performance for Rate 1/2, 1/4, 1/3 and 1/6 Turbo Codes,Block Size 16384 Bits, Software Simulation, 10 IterationsFigure 7-11 illustrates how the decoder’s average speed can be increased through the use ofstopping rules.Speed (Kbps)1000800600400Frame Error Rate = 10 -489201/617841/689201/317841/317841/233.33.754.3567.5Average Number of Iterations10 iterations fixed10200-0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5E b /N o (dB)15Figure 7-11: Illustration of Decoder Speedup Using Stopping Rules<strong>CCSDS</strong> 130.1-G-2 Page 7-10 November 2012
TM SYNCHRONIZATION AND CHANNEL CODING—SUMMARY OF CONCEPT AND RATIONALEThe x-axis shows the threshold value of E b /N 0 required to reach a FER of 10 -4 . The y-axisshows the average decoding speed, or reciprocally the average number of iterations. In thisfigure a decoder using a fixed 10 iterations achieves a speed of 300 Kb/s, and the decoder’saverage speed increases inversely as the average number of iterations is reduced byapplication of the stopping rule. The results in this figure are for a selection of recommendedTurbo codes with block lengths 1784 and 8920. The figure shows that effective stoppingrules can increase the decoder speed on the order of 50% to 100% with virtually nocompromise in the required value of E b /N 0 ; further increases in speed can also be obtained bytrading off additional SNR for increased speed.7.4.2 COMPARISON TO TRADITIONAL CONCATENATED CODESTurbo codes gain a significant performance improvement over the traditional Reed-Solomonand convolutional concatenated codes currently recommended by <strong>CCSDS</strong>. For example, toachieve an overall BER of 10 -6 with a block length of 8920 bits (depth-5 interleaving), therequired bit-SNRs are approximately 0.8 dB, 1.0 dB, and 2.6 dB for the DSN’s standardcodes consisting of the (255,223) Reed-Solomon code concatenated with the (15,1/6)convolutional code, the (15,1/4) convolutional code, and the (7,1/2) convolutional code,respectively. The performance gains achieved by the corresponding-rate Turbo codes infigures 7-6, 7-7, 7-8, 7-9, and 7-10 range from 0.9 dB to 1.6 dB.Figure 7-12 compares the performance of the recommended Turbo codes of block length1784 bits and rates 1/3 and 1/6 with the performance of the <strong>CCSDS</strong> concatenated code usedby Voyager and that of the non-<strong>CCSDS</strong> concatenated code used by Cassini and MarsPathfinder. The Voyager code consists of the recommended concatenation of the (255, 223)Reed-Solomon code with the (7,1/2) convolutional code. The Cassini/Pathfinder codeconsists of the same Reed-Solomon code concatenated with a (15, 1/6) convolutional codefor which the Viterbi decoder requires 2 8 = 256 times as many states as for the (7, 1/2) code.Performance for both concatenated codes is obtained using an interleaving depth of I = 1, notthe actual interleaving depths used in the Voyager/Cassini/Pathfinder missions, in order toprovide a fair comparison with the performance of the two Turbo codes with block length1784. In other words, a frame length of 1784 bits is assumed for all four curves in this figure.<strong>CCSDS</strong> 130.1-G-2 Page 7-11 November 2012