Design guidelines of parallel concatenated convolutional codes

A parallel concatenated convolutional coding scheme consists of two simple constituent systematic convolutional encoders linked by an interleaver. The input bits to the first encoder are scrambled by the interleaver before entering the second encoder. The codeword of the parallel concatenated code consists of the input bits to the first encoder followed by the parity check bits of both encoders. In this paper, we characterize the separate contributions that the interleaver and constituent codes give to the overall performance of the concatenated code, and present a method to “optimally” design the constituent convolutional codes