ON THE PERFORMANCE OF SEQUENTIAL AND VITERBI DECODERS FOR HIGH-RATE PUNCTURED CONVOLUTIONAL-CODES

This paper presents new computationally efficient and accurate techniq ues for estimating the performance of specific high-rate punctured con volutional codes and uses these techniques to evaluate the performance of sequential and Viterbi decoders for the best known codes. In parti cular, it demonstrates that the disparity between sequential and Viter bi decoding increases dramatically for long memory codes with high rat es and for such codes, the union bound cannot be used as a criterion f or selecting good codes for sequential decoders. In contrast, it shows that the proposed methods can be used as efficient tools for performa nce evaluation and/or identification of good high-rate punctured convo lutional codes for use with sequential decoders.