An improvement of soft-decision maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm using hard-decision bounded-distance decoding

Abstract

A new soft-decision maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm is proposed, which generates a set of candidate codewords using hard-decision bounded-distance decoding. By improving the generating method of input vectors for the bounded-distance decoding due to Kaneko et al. (see ibid., vol.40, no.3, p.320-27, 1994), the decoding time complexity is reduced without degradation of the performance. The space complexity is dependent on the bounded-distance decoding.