Soft decoding of the (23, 12, 7) Golay-code up to five errors

A new decoder is proposed to decode the (23, 12, 7) binary Golay-code up to five errors. It is based on the algorithm that can correct up to four errors for the (24, 12, 8) extended Golay-code proposed by Lin et al., thereby achieving the soft decoding in the real sense for the Golay-code. For a weight-2 or weight-3 error pattern decoded by the hard decoder for correcting up to three errors, one can find the corresponding 21 weight-4 or weight-5 error patterns and choose the one with the maximum emblematic probability value, which is defined as the product of individual bit-error probabilities corresponding to the non-zero locations of the error pattern as the ultimate choice. Finally, simulation results of this decoder over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels show that the proposed method provides 0.9 dB coding gain than that of Lin et al.´s algorithm at bit-error rate of 10^-5.