An Efficient Stopping Criterion for Turbo Product Codes

In this letter, a stopping criterion using the error- detecting capability of linear block codes is proposed for the decoding of turbo product codes. The iterative decoding is stopped when the outputs from the Chase decoder are valid codewords for all rows and columns simultaneously. Simulation shows that the proposed method can reduce about one and half iterations compared with an existing stopping method, without noticeable BER performance loss. Some modification has also been discussed which may further reduce the decoding complexity.