AN EFFICIENT MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD-DECODING ALGORITHM FOR LINEAR BLOCK-CODES WITH ALGEBRAIC DECODER

A new soft decoding algorithm for linear codes is proposed. The decodi ng algorithm works with any algebraic decoder and its performance as s trictly the same as that of maximum-likelihood-decoding (MLD . Since o ur decoding algorithm generates sets of different candidate codewords corresponding to the received sequence, is decoding complexity depends on the received sequence We compare our decoding algorithm with Chase algorithm 2 and the Tanaka-Kakigahara algorithm in which a similar me thod for generating candidate codewords is used. Computer simulation r esults indicate, for some signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), that our decod ing algorithm requires less average complexity than those of the other two algorithms, but the performance of ours is always superior to tho se of the other two.