Switched interleaving turbo codes with transmission of side information for short blocks

In this paper, we describe a novel turbo encoding and iterative decoding scheme based on the concept of switched interleaving and transmission of side information. The proposed system consists of an innovative structure for turbo encoding that allows the refinement of the code words produced with the use of a codebook with different and appropriately designed interleavers. We also develop two search procedures to infer the best interleaver in the codebook with the aid of side information containing the index of the interleaver sent to the decoder via a novel embedded transmission. At the decoder the selected interleaver is employed in the decoding procedure. The proposed system allows a significant refinement and improvement of conventional turbo codes, resulting in considerable performance improvements for short blocks and lower error floors than the existing state-of-the-art techniques.