Stochastic resonance in parallel concatenated turbo code decoding

In an array of threshold devices, we examine the effect of noise in improving performance of turbo code decoding. Such a phenomenon of noise-enhanced effect is termed stochastic resonance (SR). When signal is subthreshold, SR is observed by using Gaussian noise during iterative decoding. That is, the minimal bit error ratio (BER) is achieved at some non-zero noise intensity level. Besides, the larger the number of threshold devices is, the more remarkable the SR effect becomes. Especially when noise intensity is nearly optimal, BER approximates to zero after a few decoding iterations. Moreover, when Gaussian mixture noise is utilized, suprathreshold stochastic resonance (SSR) occurs in turbo decoding. These results show the beneficial effect of noise in channel coding and decoding.