A List-Decoding Approach to Low-Complexity Soft Maximum-Likelihood Decoding of Cyclic Codes Hengjie Yang∗, Ethan Liang∗, Hanwen Yaoy, Alexander Vardyy, Dariush Divsalarz, and Richard D. Wesel∗ ∗University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA yUniversity of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA zJet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA Email: {hengjie.yang, emliang}@ucla.edu, {hwyao, avardy}@ucsd.edu,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract—This paper provides a reduced-complexity approach Trellises with lower complexity than the natural trellis can to maximum likelihood (ML) decoding of cyclic codes. A cyclic be found using techniques developed in [7]–[9] that identify code with generator polynomial gcyclic(x) may be considered a minimum complexity trellis representations. Such trellises terminated convolutional code with a nominal rate of 1. The trellis termination redundancy lowers the rate from 1 to the are often time varying and can have a complex structure. actual rate of the cyclic code. The proposed decoder represents Furthermore, at least for the high-rate binary BCH code gcyclic(x) as the product of two polynomials, a convolutional examples [10] in this paper, the minimum complexity trellis code (CC) polynomial gcc(x) and a cyclic redundancy check representations turn out to have complexity similar to the (CRC) polynomial gcrc(x), i.e., gcyclic(x) = gcc(x)gcrc(x). This natural trellis. representation facilitates serial list Viterbi algorithm (S-LVA) decoding. Viterbi decoding is performed on the natural trellis for As a main contribution, this paper presents serial list gcc(x), and gcrc(x) is used as a CRC to determine when the S-LVA Viterbi algorithm (S-LVA) as an ML decoder for composite should conclude.