A new postprocessing architecture for soft output Viterbi decoding

Abstract

Soft output Viterbi decoding has evolved as a key technology for advanced decoding systems during the recent years. The article presents a modification of the soft output Viterbi algorithm and the resulting hardware architecture. The new approach leads to storage savings while maintaining the low computational complexity of former approaches and is thus advantageous for hardware as well as for software implementations. The complexity of soft output Viterbi decoding with the new approach is clearly less than twice that of hard decision Viterbi decoding.