A turbo code interleaver design criterion based on the performance of iterative decoding

The performance of a turbo code is dependent on two code properties: its distance spectrum and its suitability to be iteratively decoded. Both these properties are influenced by the choice of interleaver used in the turbo encoder. This paper presents an interleaver design criterion that focuses on the performance of iterative decoding, based on the correlation properties of the extrinsic inputs. Interleavers designed with the proposed criterion achieve very competitive performances, both in terms of convergence rates and error correcting capabilities.