Interleaver design for convolutional codes for the land mobile satellite channel

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the relative performance improvement realized by finite interleaving depths on correlated fading channels using convolutionally encoded BPSK. The result is an interleaver design rule that predicts the interleaving depth required to achieve almost all of the coding gain available. The utility of this rule is that it is a function only of the channel correlation function and the minimum free distance of the code. This analysis also identifies cases where the decoded bit error rate does not decrease monotontically with increasing interleaving depth.