Non-binary turbo codes on additive impulsive noise channels

It is well known that binary error-correcting codes with iterative decoders can achieve near Shannon-limit performance on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, but their performance on more realistic wireless channels can become degraded due to the presence of burst errors or impulsive noise due to interference. A better performing coding scheme is the class of non-binary codes, which are known to be more effective in correcting burst errors, but interestingly there is no research reported in the literature investigating non-binary codes on impulsive noise channels. In this paper, we investigate the performance of non-binary turbo codes defined in a finite field GF(4) on symmetric alpha-stable impulsive noise channels and compare with comparable binary turbo codes. A Cauchy receiver is also employed to mitigate the effects of the channel to assist the turbo decoding. Our simulation results show that although the non-binary turbo code performs similarly to the binary turbo code on the AWGN channel, it achieves a significant coding gain over the binary turbo code as impulsiveness increases.