Protograph-Based Interleavers for Punctured Turbo Codes

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications Vol. 66; no. 5; pp. 1833 - 1844
• Main Authors: Garzon Bohorquez, Ronald, Abdel Nour, Charbel, Douillard, Catherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Codes; Computer Science; Correlation; correlation girth; Decoding; Electronics; Engineering Sciences; Error analysis; Error correction; interleaver; Long Term Evolution; Networking and Internet Architecture; Piercing; protograph; puncturing pattern; Signal and Image processing; span; State of the art; Turbo codes; Protograph; Interleaver; Turbo code; Puncturing pattern; Span; Correlation girth
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2017.2783971

A method to design efficient puncture-constrained interleavers for turbo codes (TCs) is introduced. Resulting TCs profit from a joint optimization of puncturing pattern and interleaver to achieve an improved error rate performance. First, the puncturing pattern is selected based on the constituent code Hamming distance spectrum and on the TC extrinsic information exchange under uniform interleaving. Then, the interleaver function is defined via a layered design process taking account of several design criteria, such as minimum span, correlation girth, and puncturing constraints. We show that applying interleaving with a periodic cross connection pattern that can be assimilated to a protograph improves error-correction performance when compared to the state-of-the-art TCs. An application example is elaborated and compared with the long-term evolution standard: a significant gain in performance can be observed. An additional benefit of the proposed technique resides in the important reduction of the search space for the different interleaver parameters.