Study of Turbo Codes and Decoding in Binary Erasure Channel Based on Stopping Set Analysis

In this paper, we define a stopping set of turbo codes with the iterative decoding in the binary erasure channel. Based on the stopping set analysis, we study the block and bit erasure probabilities of turbo codes and the performance degradation of the iterative decoding against the maximum-likelihood decoding. The error floor performance of turbo codes with the iterative decoding is dominated by the small stopping sets. The performance degradation of the iterative decoding is negligible in the error floor region, so the error floor performance is asymptotically dominated by the low weight codewords. key words: turbo codes, iterative decoding, stopping set, block/bit erasure probability, error floor