Blind detection of interleaver parameters

Interleaving is a key component of many digital communication systems involving error correction schemes. It provides a form of time diversity to guard against bursts of errors. Recently, interleavers have become an even more integral part of the code design itself, if we consider for example turbo and turbo-like codes. In a non-cooperative context, such as passive listening, it is a challenging problem to estimate the interleaver parameters. In this paper we propose an algorithm that allows us to estimate the parameters of the interleaver at the output of a binary symmetric channel and to locate the codewords in the interleaved block. This gives us some clues about the interleaving function used.