ISlT 1998,Cambridge, MA, USA.

August 16 - August 21

Turbo Codes For Time Varying AWGN Channels With Application To

FH/SSMA
Hesham El Gamal
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Institute for Systems Research
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
helgamalOeng.umd.edu
Abstract - In t h i s paper we investigate the application of parallel (concatenatedconvolutional codes
(i.e., Turbo codes) to A d d i t i v e W h i t e Gaussian Noise
channels with time-varying variance. Applications of
this model include multiple-access interference and
partial-band noise j a m m i n g in frequency hopped networks. Three schemes for evaluating the likelihood
r a t i o of the channel output are compared. These
schemes provide tradeoffs between simplicity of implementation, BER performance, and robustness to
inaccuracies i n the measurements.

I. CHANNEL
MODEL
As in [l],the frequency hopping channel is modeled by a discrete time-varying AWGN channel. The channel adds zero
mean white Gaussian noise with time varying variance ( U : ) .
We assume perfect symbol synchronization and perfect power
control. Without loss of generality, we also assume that the
transmitted symbols dt E (1, -1). Hence, the log-likelihood
ratio at time t (assuming prior knowledge of the channel variance) is
Lt

Evaggelos Geraniotis
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Institute for Systems Research
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
evagelosOeng.umd.edu
the noise variance to be used in calculating the log-likelihood
ratio at time k is given by
1

4 e 8

=n-1

[POt(Yt

+ 112 + ( 1 - POt)(Yt - q2]+ c

l<t<n,t#k

(2)
where c = 2(1 - 2 ~ 0 6 ) ~2 is a constant added to unbias the
estimator; and

pot = [eq+%,t) I ] -
(3)
in which LeZt is the extrinsic information provided by the
previous decoding step.
When the receiver does not know which received symbols
are corrupted by a constant variance noise, or when the noise
variance changes sufficiently fast such that each symbol is affected by a noise sample with different variance, we need to
find a robust estimator for the log-likelihood ratio such that
the highly corrupted symbols do not affect their surrounding
symbols. The generalized maximum likelihood ratio test is
used for obtaining this robust estimator

2Yt
4

From (l),we can see the importance of the accurate estimation

of the channel variance in the Turbo decoder for two reasons:
1- In the Turbo decoding algorithm, the log-likelihood ratio is
updated after each decoding step by the extrinsic information.
Hence, we need t o have an accurate estimate of the channel
variance, even if it does not change with time, to calculate the
log-likelihood ratio.
2- The weighting function in the log-likelihood ratio should
be inversely proportional to the noise variance, otherwise the
highly corrupted symbols will lead to long bursty error blocks
at the decoder output.

11. EST~MATION
SCHEMES
In this section, we briefly describe three log-likelihood ratio
estimation schemes. The first scheme attempts to take advantage of the iterative structure of the Turbo decoder in order
to improve the channel variance estimate after each decoding step. In order to use this technique, the variance of the
channel must be constant over more than one symbol, and
the receiver must have a priori knowIedge of which symbols
were corrupted by noise vector with constant variance. The
extrinsic information supplied by the previous decoding step
is used as a priori probability in the variance estimator.
Let pot be the probability that (dt = -l), and {yl,yz, ......y,}
are the received symbols which are known to be corrupted by
a constant variance noise vector. A suboptimum estimate of

0-7803-5000-6/O8/$10.00
0 1998 IEEE.

where (TI and ~ 7 0are the variance values which maximizep(yl1)

and p(yl0) respectively. These values are given by:
61

= /Yt - 11;U0 = lyt

+ 11

(5)

substituting these values back in (4)we get

Lt = l o g -lYt

+ 11

IYt - 11

The third scheme is the simplest and is only used for comparison purposes. The log-likelihood ratio used is equal to the
channel output yt.
Upper bounds for the BER achieved by the three schemes
were obtained following [Z]. The reader is referred to [3] for
the detailed numerical results obtained through both analysis
and simulation.

REFERENCES
[I] E. Geraniotis, Multiple Access Capability of Requency
Hopped Spread Spectrum Revisited, IEEE Pans. on Communications, pp. 1066-1077,Jul 1990.
[2] D. Divsalar, S. Dolinar, and F. Pollara, Transfer function
bounds on the performance of turbo codes, Telecom. and Data
Acquisition Progress Report 42-122, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

August 1995.
Gamal, and E. Geraniotis, Turbo Codes with Channel Estimation and Dynamic Power Allocation for Anti-Jam
SFHISSMA, submitted to MILCOM 98, October 1998.

[3] H. El

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