Adaptive reliability calculation for block turbo codes

This work introduces an adaptive method for reliability calculations in iterative decoding. This new method is significant in particular to the class of early termination soft decision decoding algorithms, where instead of relying on approximate calculations to determine the required number of competing codewords, the proposed method determines adaptively the optimum number of these codewords in each iteration. When applied to block turbo codes (BTC) using Kaneko soft-input-soft-output (SISO) decoding, the technique shows significant reduction in complexity while keeping the same performance.