To the best of our knowledge, no
implementation solution for the concatenated scheme has
been proposed so far, but decoders for both turbo and
LDPC codes are present in the state of the art, mainly
targeting wireless communications. Multicode and
multistandard decoders that make flexibility their primary
concern have also been introduced recently [8–13]; they
are characterized by different degrees of datapath and
memory sharing.
This work proposes a decoder for concatenated turbo
and LDPC codes targeting deep-space communications.
The usage of the same decoding algorithm for both codes
greatly reduces the area overhead of the concatenated
scheme decoder with respect to a single LDPC or turbo
code decoder. In fact, it allows one to exploit a high degree
of datapath sharing and obtain very low power consumption
and area occupation. In addition to deep-space
communications, the proposed solution could be also
useful in further applications where retransmission of lost
packets is not allowed, such as, for example, broadcasting.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
introduces turbo and LDPC code decoding