A plurality of “local” interleavers replaces a single global interleaver for processing encoded data. If the encoded data may be represented as a matrix of data blocks, or “circulants,” each local interleaver can be the size of one or a small number of circulants. Thus, for example, if the matrix has a certain number of rows and columns, the number of local interleavers may be equal to the number of columns. Each local interleaver is small so latency is low.