Reduction of the number of iterations in turbo decoding using extrinsic information

Turbo decoding can be done in an iterative manner. This requires the delay and computational complexity for decoding an input data. We propose an efficient algorithm of decoding turbo codes that can greatly reduce the delay and computation. It uses extrinsic information as the reliability measure of each decoded bit. When the variance of the extrinsic information exceeds a threshold the iteration for decoding stops with negligible performance loss to conventional decoding algorithm.