Robustness analysis of the improved minimum descriptive length stopping criterion

Most of the turbo decoding stopping criteria assume perfect channel reliability available at the receiver since they require a threshold based on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) information. However, operational environments can vary according to frame sizes, code structures and channel reliability requirements, further aggravating the difficulty in threshold determination and convergence or non-convergence detection. This paper aims to provide a robustness analysis of improved minimum descriptive length (IMDL) stopping criterion peculiar to these factors: the frame sizes, the channel reliability requirements, the code structures, and the code rate. The robustness analysis is benchmarked to the well-known Genie stopping criterion based on the average iteration number (AIN) and bit error rate (BER) performance.