A cost-function based technique for design of good prunable interleavers for turbo codes

This paper addresses the design of semi-random, prunable interleavers for parallel concatenated convolutional codes (PCCC). The proposed technique is iterative and is based on the growth of a smaller interleaver up to the desired length N. The optimization is achieved via a minimization using a cost-function strictly related to both the correlation properties of the extrinsic information and the concept of spread of an interleaver. Performance of the designed interleavers are given in terms of bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER). Comparisons are given with respect to other prunable and ad-hoc interleaver design techniques already proposed in literature. The designed interleavers are prunable and have a behavior very similar to the interleavers designed with techniques which maximize the spread of the permutation