Computation reduction for turbo decoding through window skipping

A simple and effective technique to skip the computation of reliable portions of a frame (windows) for turbo code decoding is proposed. The proposed criterion relies on a very simple approximation of cross-entropy measure by means of thresholding. This criterion features negligible complexity and low-memory requirements. Simulation results show that, in the best case, up to 20% of windows can be skipped with no error-rate degradation. Such a significant computation reduction can be exploited to directly reduce the power consumption as well.