Abstract

This article presents the performance analysis and comparison of turbo codes for several interleavers with short blockchains. According to the symmetry concept, turbo codes consist of two symmetric convolutional codes preceded by an interleaver. Some interleavers can be described by symmetric 3 x 3 generator matrices, whereas others are represented through symmetric matrices in which the nonzero terms in the matrix are monomials. Interest in short blockchains has grown over the years because of their use in emerging applications that require the transmission of data units in the order of hundred bits. In this research, interleavers used are random interleaver, semi-random interleaver, quadratic polynomial permutation (QPP) interleaver, and chaotic Lozi map interleaver. For each interleaver, the turbo code is assessed with at least two short data distances; then, the interleavers are compared against each other. The performance of turbo codes is assessed based on bit error rate, particularly with lengths between 64 and 512 bits. Additionally, an interleaver based on Duffing chaotic maps is proposed, whose deterministic nature provides an advantage, and the performance results are presented, achieving excellent BER values for 64 bits. With these results, the effect of the interleaver on turbo codes and particularly on short block length interleavers, is studied.