Performance Analysis of Interleaving Schemes with the EXIT Chart

The interleaver is widely used in communication and signal processing. Recently it becomes an integral part of the coding and decoding strategy as in turbo code and bit-interleaved coded modulation. The interleaver design is critical to the high performance of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID). We use the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart to analyze the effect of the interleaver design on the performance of BICM-ED. The EXIT chart analysis indicates that the interleaver which gathers more extrinsic information and is closer to the decoder´s extrinsic transfer characteristic with the assumption of the Gaussian distributed a priori input has a better performance. This provides a new method for the analysis of the interleaver design. The accuracy of the EXIT chart analysis is verified by the simulation.