On allocation of turbo decoder iterations

The computational requirements of turbo decoders are heavy and depend on the number of decoding iterations. However, only a few iterations are often enough for obtaining an error free outcome. Instead of idling during the unused iterations, the released time slots can be used for enabling extra iterations required by the decoding, when the errors are more severe. Since the number of required iterations for each code block is not known beforehand, the allocation of iterations must adapt according to the current demand and the past iterations. In this paper, the dynamic adaptation is achieved by an additional buffering of incoming code blocks and the effect of utilizing unused iterations are studied.