Performance characteristics and weight distribution analysis of turbo product code with Reed–Muller component codes

In this paper, we present simulation results for Reed–Muller (RM) turbo codes over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. We also compare the simulation results of turbo product codes and block turbo codes with RM component codes over an AWGN channel. We show that minimum distance is not important as far as the BER performance of long codes is concerned. The weight distribution of RM codes of different lengths and turbo product codes with first-order RM component codes are obtained and analyzed for their good performance. We show that the weight distribution asymptotically approaches that of random coding as the code length increases.