Benchmark of Reed-Muller codes for Short Packet Transmission

Some space applications introduce the need for very short packet transmissions. This paper is related to the study of a new air interface for short packets proposed in 2006 by Alcatel Alenia Space and the TeSA/ISAE under a CNES R&D contract. We present a comparative study of soft decision Reed-Muller recursive decoding relatively to Turbo-Code for packets of 12-16 bytes. We address the issue of code shortening and puncturing to tailor the code rate and dimension, as required in most practical cases. Reed-Muller codes are highly sensitive to such configuration choices. A heuristic yielding good results is presented. The algorithm and architecture of a developed IP, implementing a generic recursive Reed-Muller decoder, are then exposed. Finally, a comparison of performances in terms of Packet Error Rate, gate count, and throughput, is drawn based on hardware implementations for the Reed-Muller and turbo decoders. For packet error rate of 10−5, and roughly the same throughput, the very elementary Reed-Muller lags the turbo decoder by 1.4 dB, but benefits of a 5x reduction on the logic complexity.