Bit-level extrinsic information exchange method for double-binary turbo codes

Nonbinary turbo codes have many advantages over single-binary turbo codes, but their decoder implementations require much more memory, particularly for storing symbolic extrinsic information to be exchanged between two soft-input-soft-output (SISO) decoders. To reduce the memory size required for double-binary turbo decoding, this paper presents a new method to convert symbolic extrinsic information to bit-level information and vice versa. By exchanging bit-level extrinsic information, the number of extrinsic information values to be exchanged in double-binary turbo decoding is reduced to the same amount as that in single-binary turbo decoding. A double-binary turbo decoder is designed for the WiMAX standard to verify the proposed method, which reduces the total memory size by 20%.