This dissertation investigates the complexity of minimum-distance decoding (MDD) algorithms for general binary linear block codes, and also investigates the use of such codes in constructing error correcting/detecting codes that are effective against both random and unidirectional errors.
A new MDD algorithm is proposed, and its complexity is analyzed and compared to that of other such algorithms. The question of whether all good codes satisfy certain properties required for efficient implementation of the algorithm is also considered. The performance of decoding algorithms, with the information bit error rate as the criterion instead of the block error rate, is also studied. New decoding rules which can yield lower information bit error rates than the MDD rule are proposed and evaluated.
A new class of binary codes is developed which corrects random errors and detects all unidirectional errors. These codes are obtained by appending a suffix to each codeword of a linear block code. To evaluate the efficiency of the new codes, a thorough comparison with the best previously obtained codes is made.
This dissertation investigates the complexity of minimum-distance decoding (MDD) algorithms for general binary linear block codes, and also investigates the use of such codes in constructing error correcting/detecting codes that are effective against both random and unidirectional errors.
A new MDD algorithm is proposed, and its complexity is analyzed and compared to that of other such algorithms. The question of whether all good codes satisfy certain properties required for efficient implementation of the algorithm is also considered. The performance of decoding algorithms, with the information bit error rate as the criterion instead of the block error rate, is also studied. New decoding rules which can yield lower information bit error rates than the MDD rule are proposed and evaluated.
A new class of binary codes is developed which corrects random errors and detects all unidirectional errors. These codes are obtained by appending a suffix to each codeword of a linear block code. To evaluate the efficiency of the new codes, a thorough comparison with the best previously obtained codes is made.
Minimum distance decoding (MDD) for a general error-correcting linear code is a hard computational problem that recently has been shown to beNP-hard. The complexity of known decoding algorithms is determined by\min (2^{k},2^{n-k}), wherenis the code length andkis the number of information digits. Two new algorithms are suggested that reduce substantially the complexity of MDD. The algorithms use a new concept of zero neighbors--a special set of codewords. Only these codewords (which can be computed in advance) should be stored and used in the decoding procedure. The number of zero neighbors is shown to be very small compared with\min (2^{k},2^{n-k})forn \gg 1and a wide range of code ratesR = k/n. For example, forR \approx 0.5this number grows approximately as a square root of the number of codewords.
For binary linear block codes, we introduce a multiple generalized minimum distance (GMD) decoding algorithm, where GMD-like decoding is iterated around a few appropriately selected search centers. Compared with the original GMD decoding by Forney (1966), this decoding algorithm provides better error performance by increasing the number of iterations of erasure and error correction moderately. To reduce the number of iterations, we derive new effective sufficient conditions on the optimality of decoded codewords.
This dissertation presents a novel approach to soft decision decoding for binary linear block codes. The basic idea of this approach is to achieve a desired error performance progressively in a number of stages. For each decoding stage, the error performance is highly bounded and the decoding is terminated at the stage where either near-optimum error performance or a desired level of error performance is achieved. As a result, more flexibility in the trade-off between performance and decoding complexity is provided. The proposed decoding is based on the reordering of the received symbols according to their reliability measure. In the dissertation, we evaluate the statistics of the noise after ordering. Based on these statistics, we derive two monotonic properties which dictate the reprocessing strategy. Each codeword is decoded in two steps: (1) hard-decision decoding based on reliability information and (2) reprocessing of the hard-decision decoded codeword in successive stages until the desired performance is achieved. The reprocessing is based on the monotonic properties of the ordering and is carried out using a cost function. A new resource test highly related to the reprocessing strategy is introduced to reduce the number of computations for each reprocessing stage. For short codes of lengths N ≤ 32 or medium codes with 32 < N ≤ 64 with rate R ≥ 0.6, near-optimum bit error performance is achieved in two stages of reprocessing with at most a computation complexity of o(K2) constructed code-words, where K is the dimension of the code. For longer codes, three or more reprocessing stages are required to achieve near-optimum decoding. However, most of the coding gain is obtained within the first two reprocessing stages for error performances of practical interest. The proposed decoding algorithm applies to any binary linear code, does not require any data storage and is well suitable for parallel processing. Furthermore, the maximum number of computations required at each reprocessing stage is fixed, which prevents buffer overflow at low SNR. Further reductions of the number of computations based on probabilistic or decomposable properties of the code considered are also investigated. The generalization of the algorithm to other channels is discussed. Finally, the discrete time channel associated with the AWGN model after ordering is greatly simplified. This simplification allows an important reduction of the number of computations required to evaluate the theoretical error performance of any algorithm based on a partial or total ordering.
For iterative soft-decision decoding algorithms for binary linear block codes, error performance and computational complexity are very important factors.In this thesis, suÆcient conditions of the optimality of decoded codeword and a suÆcient condition which is used for ruling-out some useless iterations of bounded distance decoding which reduces the computational complexity of iterative soft-decision decoding algorithms are shown.New iterative soft-decision decoding algorithms which uses the suÆcient conditions of the optimality of decoded codeword to achievegood error performance with small computational complexity are also shown.First, the suÆcient conditions are derived based on: (1) partial knowledge of the distance pro le of the code, and (2) previously generated candidate codewords.When the numberof previously generated candidate codewords is greater than 1, the conditions presented here are less stringent than those derived by Taipale and Pursley [4] and Kaneko et.al.[5].The condition based on three previously generated candidate codewords is the rst such s u Æ c i e n t condition that has ever been derived.It is shown by computer simulation that these suÆcient condions reduce the computational complexity of iterative decoding algorithms without degradation of error performance.Second, a suÆcient condition to rule-out some useless test error patterns is derived.In an iterative decoding algorithm, such as Chase Type-II decoding algorithm[2] and its improved versions, candidate codewords for a received vector are generated
A new bounded-distance (BD) decoding algorithm is presented for binary linear (n, k, d) block codes on additive white Gaussian noise channels. The algorithm is based on the generalized minimum distance (GMD) decoding algorithm of Forney (1989) using the acceptance criterion of Taipale and Pursley (GMD/TP) proposed in 1991. It is shown that the GMD/TP decoding algorithm is a BD decoding algorithm with effective error coefficient (/sup n//sub d/). It is also shown that the decision regions of GMD/TP are good inner approximations of those of full GMD decoding, and therefore full GMD decoding is BD and has an effective error coefficient that is well approximated by (/sup n//sub d/). Moreover, by adding a d-erasure-correction step to GMD decoding, the effective error coefficient can be reduced to A/sub d/, the number of minimum-weight codewords, which is the same as the effective error coefficient of maximum-likelihood decoding. The decoding algorithm is mainly based on algebraic errors-and-erasures decoding and therefore has polynomial rather than exponential complexity.
This dissertation deals with maximum-likelihood soft-decision decoding as well as suboptimal soft-decision decoding of linear block codes. We present three new decoding algorithms: $MA\sp*D,\ H\sp*,$ and Directed Search. The first algorithm, $MA\sp*D,$ is an instance of Algorithm $A\sp*$ that conducts heuristic search through a code tree of the transmitted code when the decoding problem is transformed into a problem of graph-search through a code tree. $MA\sp*D$ takes into consideration more properties of the code and is considerably more efficient than the original $A\sp*$ decoding algorithm presented by Han, Hartmann, and Chen in 1993. The second algorithm, $H\sp*,$ is a new decoding algorithm that determines the value of every component of a minimum-cost codeword by estimating the cost of the minimum-cost codeword, which has a fixed value at one of the k most reliable, linearly independent bit positions. The suboptimal version of this algorithm is combined with other decoding algorithms to reduce the search space during the decoding process. The third algorithm, Directed Search, is designed to enhance the performance of soft-decision decoding by searching in continuous space. This approach explores the search space between a given vector and the received vector and finds the codeword closest to the received vector in the space explored. We also present a novel and efficient hybrid decoding algorithm for (n, k) linear block codes. It hybridizes $MA\sp*D,\ H\sp*,$ and Directed Search algorithms, utilizing their strengths to make the decoding more efficient. Simulation results for this hybrid algorithm are presented for the (104,52) binary-extended quadratic residue code and for the (128,64), the (256, 131), and the (256, 139) binary-extended BCH codes. This hybrid algorithm can efficiently decode the (104,52) binary extended quadratic residue code and the (128,64) code for any signal-to-noise ratio and has near-optimal to optimal performance. Previously, no practical decoder could decode these two codes with such a performance for all signal-to-noise ratio ranges.