Interleavingin

Interleavingin is a term that appears in some texts as a shorthand for applying interleaving techniques within a process or system. In practice, interleaving refers to reorganizing data so that elements from different sources are distributed across a sequence, rather than remaining in a single contiguous block. The primary goals are to mitigate burst effects, such as burst errors in communications, and to improve throughput by better utilizing parallel paths.

Applications of interleavingin-oriented concepts span digital communications, storage systems, and software pipelines. In communications, channel interleaving spreads consecutive symbols across multiple code blocks to reduce the impact of isolated errors. In storage architectures, data bits may be interleaved across tracks or stripes to balance I/O load and increase bandwidth. In software pipelines, interleaving can be used to hide latency by alternating work across multiple stages or tasks.

Common interleaving schemes include block interleaving, where a message is written row-wise into a matrix and read column-wise; convolutional interleaving, which uses shift registers to distribute inputs; and time interleaving, which alternates samples in time to distribute work. De-interleaving is the corresponding process used to reconstruct the original order.

Trade-offs accompany interleaving: it generally increases resilience to burst errors and improves throughput at the cost of added latency, memory overhead, and implementation complexity. The exact meaning of interleavingin is not standardized and is typically clarified by the context in which it is used.

See also: interleaving, deinterleaving, memory interleaving, channel coding, error-correcting codes.