Method and apparatus for encoding and decoding data

A method and apparatus for turbo coding and decoding are provided herein. During operation, a concatenated transport block (CTB) of length X is received, a forward error correction block size (FEC) kl of a group of non-contiguous FEC block sizes available between Kmin and Kmax is determined, and where Kmin <= Kl <Kmax and where kl is additionally based in X. The concatenated transport block of length X is segmented into C segments each of substantially equal size K1. An FEC key is determined for each of the C segments using the FEC block size Kl, and the C FEC keys are transmitted through the channel.