General structure and construction of tail biting trellises for linear block codes

Abstract

A tail biting trellis for a code is a trellis with multiple starting and ending states which has the following structures: (1) the starting and ending state spaces are identical; (2) every starting state has a unique ending state and they are the same state; and (3) a path in the trellis is a valid codeword if and only if its starting and ending states are identical. For a block code, tail biting trellis representation may result in a significant reduction in trellis complexity.