Turbo Lattices: Construction and Error Decoding Performance

In this paper a new class of lattices called turbo lattices is introduced and established. We use the lattice Construction D to produce turbo lattices. This method needs a set of nested linear codes as its underlying structure. We benefit from turbo codes as our basis codes. Therefore, a set of nested turbo codes based on nested interleavers (block interleavers) and nested convolutional codes is built. To this end, we employ both tail-biting and zero-tail convolutional codes. Using these codes, along with construction D, turbo lattices are created. Several properties of Construction D lattices and fundamental characteristics of turbo lattices including the minimum distance, coding gain and kissing number are investigated. Furthermore, a multi-stage turbo lattice decoding algorithm based on iterative turbo decoding algorithm is given. We show, by simulation, that turbo lattices attain good error performance within $\sim1.25 dB$ from capacity at block length of $n=1035$. Also an excellent performance of only $\sim.5 dB$ away from capacity at SER of $10^{-5}$ is achieved for size $n=10131$.