SIMULATION ANALYSIS OF THE VITERBI CONVOLUTIONAL DECODING ALGORITHM
Teodor B Iliev · 2006
Abstract. The advantage of Viterbi decoding, compared with brute–force decoding, is that the complexity of Viterbi decoding is not a function of the number of symbols in the codeword sequence. The Viterbi algorithm removes from consideration those trellis paths that could not possibly be candidates for the maximum likelihood choice. The decoder continues in this way to advance deeper into the trellis, making decision by eliminating the least likely paths. The paper is devoted to an example of Viterbi convolutional decoding, that the goal of selecting the optimum path can be expressed, equivalently, as choosing the codeword with the maximum likelihood metric, or as choosing the codeword with the minimum Hamming distance. We propose encoding and decoding structure with their trellis diagrams and algorithm for hard and soft decoding decision. The received results from the simulation model provide the opportunity of assessing the quality of decoding.