On the concatenation of turbo codes and Reed-Solomon codes

This paper studies the concatenation of turbo codes and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The error patterns of turbo codes are first analyzed. Since error patterns of turbo codes are much different than those of convolutional codes, the design rules for a matched interleaver between turbo codes and RS codes are provided. As an application to digital video broadcasting by satellite (DVB-S), the performance of Forney interleavers with different spreading abilities is studied for a fixed turbo code. For a (34,6) Forney interleaver, the performance of turbo codes with different block sizes is also studied. A delay and performance tradeoff can be made via simulation results.