Latency Reduced LTE-A Turbo-Code Decoding with Iteration Balancing on Transport Block Level

Abstract:
The requirements of todays standards for wireless mobile applications require sophisticated Turbo-Code decoder architectures that support throughputs of 1-2 Gbps at low latencies. With the next generation of standards, however, the throughput requirements will be in the order of tens of Gbps, which is not achieved by further parallelization on Turbo-Code decoder level without sacrificing flexibility. We propose to leverage state-of-the-art iteration control and the grouping of code blocks into transport blocks as it is used in LTE-A to increase the throughput of Turbo-Code decoders by an iteration balancing across multiple code blocks and evaluate our approach for single and parallel Turbo-Code decoder instances. We show, that by using iteration balancing, either throughput gains of up to 50% are possible without a degradation in decoding performance or the decoding performance can be improved by up to 0:3dB for the same throughput.