A new stopping criterion for efficient early termination in turbo decoder designs

Although many stopping methods of iterative decoding have been discussed in the literatures, many of them only focus on the solvable decoding. In this paper, we proposed a new rule, called measurement of reliability (MOR) that can be used to define the decoding boundary. With two pre-simulated threshold values, the iterative decoding can stop in either high-SNR situation where the decoded bits are highly reliable, or in low-SNR situation where the decoder already has no capability to decode. Through the simulations, the reduced iterations due to early termination (ET) will not affect the SNR performance. Based on our analysis and simulation results, we can further modify the popularly used GENIE chart. Hence, the iterative decoding can be terminated based on two pre-determined threshold values. The ET property can help to either reduce the computational complexity or power consumptions in implementing the iterative decoding in DSP processors or VLSIs.