Soft Decision Sequential Decoding for Reed Solomon Codes Using the Creeper Algorithm

Abstract

A method for soft decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes using the Creeper Algorithm (CA) is investigated. The CA is an algorithm for sequential decoding which combines the best properties of the conventional stack and Fano algorithms. It is originally developed for decoding convolutional codes. In this paper multilevel phase-shift keying (MPSK) system is used as the modulation scheme in memoryless Rayleigh fading channel. Simulation results show that the CA is a good candidate to the stack-based soft decision decoding algorithm since it requires much less memory and on the average provides much less computational effort than the stack algorithm.