The super-trellis structure of turbo codes

In this contribution we derive the super-trellis structure of turbo codes. We show that this structure and its associated decoding complexity depend strongly on the interleaver applied in the turbo encoder. We provide upper bounds for the super-trellis complexity. Turbo codes are usually decoded by an iterative decoding algorithm, which is suboptimum. Applying the super-trellis structure, we can optimally decode simple turbo codes and compare the associated bit-error rate results to those of iterative algorithms.