In
information theory,
turbo codes (originally in French
Turbocodes) are a class of high-performance
forward error correction (FEC) codes developed around 1990-91 (but first published in 1993), which were the first practical codes to closely approach the
channel capacity, a theoretical maximum for the
code rate at which reliable communication is still possible given a specific noise level. Turbo codes are finding use in
3G/
4G mobile communications (e.g. in
UMTS and
LTE) and in (
deep space)
satellite communications as well as other applications where designers seek to achieve reliable information transfer over bandwidth- or latency-constrained communication links in the presence of data-corrupting noise. Turbo codes are nowadays competing with
LDPC codes, which provide similar performance.