Buffer Management for Sequential Decoding

Sequential decoding has been found to be an efficient means of communicating at low undetected error rates from deep space probes, but another failure mechanism known as erasure or computational overflow remains a significant problem. The erasure of a block occurs when the decoder has not finished decoding that block at the time that it must be output. The erasure rate can be unacceptably high even when the decoder is spending over half of its time idly awaiting incoming data. By drawing upon analogies in computer time sharing, this concise paper develops a buffer-management strategy which reduces the decoder idle time to a negligible level, and therefore improves the erasure probability of a sequential decoder. For a decoder with a speed advantage of ten and a buffer size of ten blocks, operating at an erasure rate of 10^-2, use of this buffer-management strategy reduces the erasure rate to less than 10^-4.