Performance of turbo-codes in an aeronautical satcom multipath environment

So-called "turbo codes" currently represent one of the most active areas of research in coding theory. Turbo codes have performance that approaches the Shannon limit on the capacity of a bandlimited communications channel. Previously, we discussed applications of turbo codes to aeronautical satellite communications in general, and presented results for an additive white Gaussian noise environment. Because of the interleavers that are an integral part of the encoding process, turbo codes offer some immunity to the correlated signal disruptions characteristic of propagation effects and interference related disruptions. This paper extends the earlier work by a more detailed consideration of the performance of turbo codes in the multipath fading environment typical of aeronautical satellite communications.