Performance of Möbius interleavers for turbo codes

In this paper, we study the minimum free distance and error performance of turbo encoders with Möbius interleavers. In order to be capable of estimating the minimum free distance of these interleavers using binary-fixed point (BFP) algorithm, new deterministic interleavers called “truncated Möbius interleavers” are defined and constructed. It is shown how the shifted cycles of these interleavers can be related to the cycle structure of the primary Möbius transformation and its coefficients. By adjusting some parameters, an upper bound on the number of total tested BFPs for the proposed truncated Möbius interleavers is found. One distinctive property of Möbius interleavers is that their inverse can also be represented and computed with Möbius functions. Simulations are conducted to compare the error performance of the proposed truncated Möbius interleavers with quadratic permutation polynomial (QPP) interleavers whose inverses are also representable by a quadratic equation (Ryu and Takeshita in IEEE Trans Inf Theory 52(3):1254–1260, 2006). It is finally shown that the truncated Möbius interleavers can interleave sequences of information bits faster than QPP interleavers.