A difficult problem for turbo codes is the efficient and accurate determination of the distance spectrum, or even just the minimum distance, for specific interleavers. This is especially true for large blocks, with many thousands of data bits, if the distance is high. This paper compares a number of recent distance estimation techniques and introduces a new approach, based on using specific event impulse patterns and iterative processing, that is specifically tailored to handle long interleavers with high spread. The new method is as reliable as two previous iterative multiple-impulse methods, but with much lower complexity. A minimum distance of 60 has been estimated for a rate 1/3, 8-state, turbo code with a dithered relative prime (DRP) interleaver of length K=65,536.
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