Upper bound on the minimum distance of turbo codes

An upper bound on the minimum distance of turbo codes is derived, which depends only on the interleaver length and the component scramblers employed. The derivation of this bound considers exclusively turbo encoder input words of weight 2. The bound does not only hold for a particular interleaver but for all possible interleavers including the best. It is shown that in contrast to general linear binary codes the minimum distance of turbo codes cannot grow stronger than the square root of the block length. This implies that turbo codes are asymptotically bad. A rigorous proof for the bound is provided, which is based on a geometric approach. The authors would like to thank the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft – Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen, Erlangen, for supporting this work. December 11, 2000 DRAFT BREILING, HUBER: UPPER BOUND ...; IEEE TRANS. ON COMM., FINAL VERSION 16/10/2000 2