Methods of early-termination and output selection for iterative decoders
are disclosed. A hybrid early-termination method combines the
output-comparison-based method with the parity-check-based method. The
hybrid approach is far more superior in termination reliability in either
of the two individual approaches, without their disadvantages. The hybrid
termination method effectively and reliably terminates the iterative
decoding process, cutting the majority of the computational load while
eliminating the degradation in the bit error rate (BER) and
frame-error-rate (FER) performance due to incorrectly terminated frames.
An output selection procedure chooses the best possible decoded frame
among those from all iterations if the iterative decoding process cannot
be early-terminated during the decoding of a received frame and if the
iterative decoder has reached the maximum number of iterations, thereby
eliminating the iteration abnormality that is inherent in the iterative
decoding approach, and improving the BER performance of the standard
iterative decoders.
