A New Stopping Criterion for Iterative Decoding

In this paper we propose a new stopping criterion foriterative decoding. The new stopping rule observes the a priori of different symbols and stops the iterations, whenever the average number of symbols in a trellis section below a certain a priori value, is above a pre-defined threshold. According to the numerical examples for some practical transmission systems, the proposed criterion saves more decoding iterations than the existing stopping rules. Moreover it performs very close to the maximum possible limit of any stopping rule, while keeping minimum degradation in bit error rate (BER) performance