Leaking interleavers for UEP Turbo codes

Interleaving is a key to Turbo coding´s exceptional performance. An interleaver provides bit-permutation designed to ensure deterministic randomness. When applying interleavers to unequal error protecting (UEP) Turbo codes, typically, priority classes protected with different rates are kept separate. This work, however, gives insight, how the performance changes, when block boundaries are relaxed, leaking bits to other classes. The effect of this leakage is an improvement of the average performance due to a virtually bigger interleaver size, with the drawback of a flooring of the individual performances to the worst protection (highest code rate) involved in a certain class.