ANN Assisted Turbo Coding for use with OFDM
Signals in Wireless Channels
Aradhana Misra
Deptt. of Electronics and Communication Technology
Gauhati University
Guwahati-781014, Assam, India.
aradhana66@gmail.com
Abstract—- This paper deals with adding ANN assisted Turbo
coding and decoding to OFDM signal for transmission in the
wireless channel. Channel coding improves the performance of
OFDM signal, but the system design becomes complex due to the
iterative decoding technique. The system design can be simplified
and made faster by the use of ANN in the coding and decoding
process. Simulation is done in MATLAB to analyse the BER
performance of Turbo coded OFDM in Rayleigh and Rician
fading channel.
Keywords- OFDM, ANN, Turbo Code, LogMAP Decoder.
I. INTRODUCTION
In modern communication system, Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an important wide band
transmission scheme which uses parallel frequency channels to
transmit modulated data. OFDM has received appreciation in
many applications due to its high data rate and robustness to
time dispersion in multipath fading and simple equalization at
the receiver. OFDM allows many users to transmit in an
allocated band by sub-dividing the entire bandwidth into
several narrowband channels. The sub-channels are generated
such that they are orthogonal to each other, thus allowing the
sub-channels to be closely spaced in the spectrum. The
overlapping sub-channels make the OFDM system more
spectrum efficient than the standard frequency division
multiplexing (FDM) system. The main advantage of using
OFDM for transmitting data over a dispersive channel is that
the output symbols at the OFDM receiver are free from
Intersymbol Interference (ISI). The performance of an OFDM
system in a multipath fading environment can be further
improved by using a channel coding technique to do away with
the effects of the channel. However, the improvement in BER
comes at a cost of design complexity in the encoder and
decoder.
The system design can be simplified by the use of soft
computing methods like Artificial Neural Network (ANN).
This work deals with an ANN assisted system for encoding and
decoding applications with OFDM signal in a wireless channel.
The BER performance in AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician fading
channels are considered for Turbo coded signal for
transmission using OFDM.
978-1-4577-0240-2/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Kandarpa Kumar Sarma
Deptt. of Electronics and Communication Technology
Gauhati University
Guwahati-781014, Assam, India.
kandarpaks@gmail.com
Available literature shows the use of various error
correcting codes like the Reed-Solomon code, convolution
code and Turbo codes in an OFDM signal. In [1], digital
modulation schemes, such as M-PSK (M-ary Phase Shift
Keying) and M-QAM (M-ary Quadrature Amplitude
Modulation), which can be selected for OFDM system on the
basis of the requirement of power or spectrum efficiency and
BER analysis has been considered. High value of M-ary
increases spectrum efficiency, and can be used for large
capacity, long distance applications at the cost of slight
increase in Eb/No[1]. L. Piazzo, and L. Hanzo [2], describes
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), with
basic block diagrams, as a convenient digital modulation
scheme to transmit data encoded by means of Turbo Trellis
Coded Modulation (TTCM). Y. Wang and L.Wei, provide a
Turbo-TCM Coded OFDM Systems for Non-Gaussian
Channel, where they investigate the effect of impulsive noise
on the performance of the Turbo TCM coded OFDM system
over UWB channel. BER performance of Turbo TCM coded
OFDM system under AWGN noise and impulsive noises
shows that the performance of OFDM system in the impulsive
noise environment depends on the impulsivity of the noise as
well as on the decoding algorithm [3]. A neural network Turbo
decoder had been proposed as being faster and less complex
than other Turbo decoders in [4].
The paper is organized as follows: In section II, the ANN
assisted Turbo coded OFDM system has been described,
highlighting the major features. The experimental details
including the parameters used for simulation and the results
obtained are presented in section III and section IV concludes
the work.
The paper is organized as follows: In section II, the ANN
assisted Turbo coded OFDM system has been described,
highlighting the major features. The experimental details
including the parameters used for simulation and the results
obtained are presented in section III and section IV concludes
the work.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
Figure1 shows the block diagram of the system model of
Turbo coded OFDM system which consists of a simple
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transmitter/receiver pair and the propagation channel, clearly
showing how the ANN would fit into the system. The
information data is encoded using ANN assisted Turbo coder
and then modulated using digital modulation schemes like M-
PSK or M-QAM. The modulated symbols are allotted to
parallel subcarriers before transmission through the channel. At
the receiver end, the received symbols are OFDM
demodulated, demapped and then decoded to recover the
transmitted data. The decoding process is performed by ANN
to reduce design complexity. A brief overview of each of the
components in the system is presented next.
Figure 1. ANN assisted Turbo coded OFDM system
A. Turbo Encoder
The conventional Turbo encoder consists of two Recursive
Systematic Convolution (RSC) encoders (Figure2). The input
message bits are fed directly to one of the encoders while an
interleaved sequence of the same is fed to the second encoder.
The encoded sequence consists of the information bits
concatenated with the parity bits from the two encoders. The
encoder can be designed to be either punctured or unpunctured.
In the system model under consideration in this work, rate ½
code has been generated by puncturing the parity bits from the
two RSC encoders. The conventional encoder is then replaced
by an ANN that is trained to perform the encoding process.
Figure 2. Turbo Encoder
B. Turbo Decoder
For a Turbo decoder that uses concatenated codes, soft
decision decoding is used rather than hard decision decoding.
In the decoder being used for our simulation, where there are
two component codes, the soft decision of one decoder is
passed to the input of the other decoder, and the process is
iterated so as to arrive at a reliable decision [5]. Here we have
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considered a LogMap decoder with 10 iterations to achieve a
BER of 10-4 at around 10 db for faded channel. The complexity
of implementing several iterations to arrive at a reliable
decision can be reduced by implementing ANN to perform the
decoding performance.
Figure 3. Iterative decoding scheme
C. OFDM System
In the OFDM modulator, digitally modulated information
symbols are allotted to parallel carriers by the serial to parallel
converter. The Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) is
performed to convert the time domain signal to frequency
domain before transmission. IFFT ensures that the carriers are
orthogonal to each other. The parallel output streams from the
IFFT block are converted to serial form and a cyclic prefix is
added to mitigate the dispersive effects of the channel. At the
receiver, the cyclic prefix is removed before converting the
data into parallel stream. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)
block transforms the signal back to time domain signal. The
serial data is then demapped before applying it to the decoder.
Figure 4. DM block diagram
D. Wireless Channel
In wireless communication multipath propagation is a
common instance. Fading effect takes place due to reception of
two or more number of signals at a slightly different time,
leading to change in amplitude, phase and multipath delays of
the transmitted signal, called as fading [6]. Out of the several
kinds of faded channel, the Rayleigh and Rician faded channel
are used in this work.
 Rayleigh Faded Channel: The Rayleigh distribution is III. EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS AND RESULTS
given by p(r) as below, where the ı2 is the time average power The performance of the designed system is evaluated
of the received signal [6]. through MATLAB simulation considering BER as the
­ r (− A 2 )
2
performance parameter. The details of the signal and system
° e 2σ characteristics has been elaborated in this section.
p (r ) = ® σ 2 for (0 ≤ r ≤ ∞)
°0, for (r < o)
¯ OFDM signal is generated using IFFT technique which
Rician Faded Channel: The Rician distribution that is provides a easy method to generate orthogonal sub-carriers.
used for LOS communication ,can be described as p(r), The parameters used are as follows:

­ r − ( r + A2 ) Ar
2 2

° e 2σ I 0 ( 2 ) TABLE I. SPECIFICATIONS OF OFDM SIGNAL

p( r ) = ®σ 2 σ for ( A ≥ 0, r ≥ 0)
°0, for (r < o) No of sub-carriers 52
¯
FFT length 64
A2 Cyclic prefix 16
K= 2
2σ length
Symbols per 1000
where, the Rician distribution is described in terms of carrier
parameter K, known as Rician factor, which is the ratio SNR ±10 dB
between the deterministic signal power and the variance of the Modulation Types BPSK,QPSK,8PSK,16PSK
multipath.

E. Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

ANN [7] is an excellent mathematical tool, that is
composed of simple elements, called neurons, that can
perform parallel operations. It is a network inspired by
biological nervous systems, which can establish a
relationship between the input and output data by adjusting its
weights through a learning process. From the structural point
of view a Neural Network may be single layered or it may be
multilayered. Each neuron of one layer is connected to each
and every neuron of the next layer.
The ANN has gained its popularity in solving different
complex problems in communication as it can use in
transmitter, channel and receiver side information to update its
Figure 6. Spectrum of OFDM signal generated
learning.
The BER performance has been observed for the ODFM
F. ANN training and testing: signal for M-PSK and M-QAM digitally modulated signals
The learning process used in the work is of supervised kind (M=2, 4, 8, 16) signals in AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician fading
and the specific network type is the Multi Layer Perceptron channel (Figure7).
(MLP) which is a feedforward structure. The MLP is composed BER Vs SNR for MPSK OFDM signal in Rayleigh Fading channel
of input layer, hidden layer and a output layer (Figure5). 10
0

-1
10
BER

-2
10

-3
10
bpsk
qpsk
8psk
16psk
Figure 5. Multi Layer Perceptron
-4
10
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25
SNR(dB)

Figure 7. BER plot for PSK –OFDM signals in Rayleigh Faded channel

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 In AWGN as well as faded channel, the BER performance performance graph of ANN training for the decoder is shown
is as follows: in Figure10. An improvement in the BER is observed when the
Turbo encoding/decoding is performed using ANN as
BER BPSK < BERQPSK < BER8PSK < BER16PSK compared to iterative decoding technique (Figure11).
Similar variation is observed in case of M-QAM modulated
signals. TABLE III. ANN PARAMETERS USED FOR TRAINING
The details of the conventional Turbo encoder used are ANN type Feed forward
tabulated in form of Table II.
Number of Layers One input, one hidden, one output

TABLE II. SPECIFICATION OF TURBO ENCODER/DECODER Hidden layer size 1.5 times of input
Input layer size Size of the signal sample at the
Rate 1/2
receiver end
Type 2 RSC encoders;
SNR consideration ±10 dB
punctured
Generator G=[1 1 1;1 0 1] Transfer function Logsig -tansig –tansig- logsig
polynomial combination
Decoder type LogMap decoder
Convergence limit 10-2
No of iterations 10
SNR ±10 dB Training type Back propagation with adaptive
learning rate
The Turbo coded OFDM has been compared with the
uncoded OFDM signal in Rayleigh channel in Figure8 and in
Rician channel in Figure9. In wireless faded channel, use of
Turbo coding in OFDM signal improves the BER for higher
value of SNR, for both Rayleigh and Rician fading channel.

Figure 8. BER plot for OFDM signal and Turbo coded OFDM signal in
Rayleigh faded channel.

Figure 10. Performance plot for ANN decoder

Figure 9. BER plot for OFDM signal and Turbo coded OFDM signal in
Rician faded channel.

Two separate ANNs have been trained and tested to

perform the encoding and the decoding process of Turbo code
to be used with the OFDM signal. Table III shows the details
of the parameters used for the training of the network. The Figure 11. BER plot for Turbo coded OFDM signal in Rayleigh faded channel
using iterative decoder and ANN based decoder

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 IV. CONCLUSION
The performance of the ANN assisted Turbo coded OFDM
is found to be superior compared to the Turbo coded OFDM
with iterative decoding in terms of BER as well as design
complexity and time of operation. The outcome of ANN based
decoder is more reliable as it can be trained to mitigate the
effect of the faded channel to arrive at an optimum BER value.

REFERENCE
[1] J.N. Patel and U.D Dalal: "A Comparative Performance Analysis of
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[2] L Piazzo and L Hanzo; "TTCM-OFDM over dispersive fading
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[3] Y. Wang and L. Wei; , "Turbo TCM Coded OFDM Systems for Non-
Gaussian Channels," in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium
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[5] B. Sklar and P.K. Ray; “Digital Communications-Fundamentals and
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[6] T. S.Rappaport; “ Wireless Communications-Principles and Practice,”
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[7] S. Haykin: “Neural Networks- A Comprehensive Foundation”, 2nd
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