This work proposes a general framework for the design and simulation of
network on chip based turbo decoder architectures. Several parameters in the
design space are investigated, namely the network topology, the parallelism
degree, the rate at which messages are sent by processing nodes over the
network and the routing strategy. The main results of this analysis are: i) the
most suited topologies to achieve high throughput with a limited complexity
overhead are generalized de-Bruijn and generalized Kautz topologies; ii)
depending on the throughput requirements different parallelism degrees, message
injection rates and routing algorithms can be used to minimize the network area
overhead.