Proposal of a new punctured turbo coding scheme for TH-UWB communications

This paper deals with a novel cross-layer approach, involving both Physical and Data Link layers, suitable for THUWB systems, named Punctured Hopping (PH). PH scheme permits to limit the throughput reduction of the basic full rate Turbo Coding scheme, while maintaining the same code free distance. The proposed coding scheme performs a puncturing of the parity bits, but, differently from the Rate Compatible Punctured Turbo Codes (RCPTC) scheme, the less significant bits within a coded frame are not completely discarded as only half of their impulses are punctured, thus preserving the error correcting capabilities jointly with achieving a better spectral efficiency. The performance of the proposed PH coding scheme has been derived in an indoor multipath fading channel and compared with the uncoded, the basic full rate and the RCPTC systems. The results show a significant performance gain in comparison with the RCPTC and, hence, a significant reduction of the performance loss in comparison with the basic full rate Turbo Coding scheme, while maintaining the same throughput of the RCPTC.