A New Metric for Permutation Polynomial Interleavers

The spread factor of an interleaver is a common measure for turbo coding applications. Maximum-spread interleavers are interleavers whose spread factors achieve the upper bound. An infinite sequence of quadratic permutation polynomials over integer rings that generate maximum-spread interleavers is presented. New properties of permutation polynomial interleavers are investigated from an algebraic-geometric perspective resulting in a new non-linearity metric for interleavers. A new interleaver metric that is a function of both the non-linearity metric and the spread factor is proposed. A table of good interleavers for a variety of interleaver lengths according to the new metric is listed. Extensive computer simulation results with impressive frame error rates confirm the efficacy of the new metric. Further, when tail-biting constituent codes are used, the resulting turbo codes are quasi-cyclic