Hard decision based low SNR early termination for LTE Turbo decoding

In this paper a syndrome based Low SNR early termination (Low SNR ET) scheme for Turbo decoding is presented. The scheme is based only on hard decision binary computations and is therefore easy to realize. While Low SNR ET is a general principle that can be applied in various scenarios, the focus of this work is on its application in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. It is shown that Low SNR ET is in particular very effective for typical LTE scenarios and that the proposed scheme can reduce the decoding iterations by about one third.