New early termination methos for turbo decoders

Turbo codes have large latency due to iterative decoding steps and complex decoding algorithms. To decrease the decoding delay it is essential to terminate the decoding operation as soon as there is sufficient information for data bits. Early termination can be achieved by defining stopping criteria beyond which negligible achievement is observed. In this article, we investigate some efficient stopping criteria based on the variance of extrinsic information and population of the bits below a predetermined threshold. We show that variance based method is better than its previously suggested counterparts, and threshold based method is the least complex one considering the available methods.