Also known as: interleaving

Interleaving reorders bits or symbols before transmission and restores their order on receive, so that a burst of errors (from fading or interference) is spread thinly across many codewords rather than overwhelming one.¹

Interleaving reorders bits so a burst of errors is scattered, letting the error-correction code cope.

How it works

Because FEC codes correct only a limited number of errors per codeword, distributing a burst lets each codeword’s correction cope. The receiver de-interleaves before decoding.

Relevance to SDR

Interleaving makes digital radio robust to multipath fading and short interference bursts.

Sources

1. Interleaving (data) — Wikipedia, for reordering data to spread burst errors across codewords. ↩

See also

• Forward error correction (FEC)
• Reed–Solomon code
• BCH code
• Multipath propagation

Learn it step by step

• The demodulation pipeline

From the blog

• SDR Internals, Part 9: Framing & forward error correction