List-of-2 soft decision viterbi inner decoder for a generalized concatenated coding system

This paper proposes the use of list-of-2 soft decision Viterbi Algorithm (LSOVA) as a suitable diversity block inner decoding technique for the new generalized concatenated coding system. In this system, the LSOVA is the inner decoder and Vector Symbol Decoding (VSD) is the outer decoder. This new coding system allows the inner code and the outer code to be any combination of a linear block code and a convolutional code. This is possible because the outer decoding technique, VSD, can decode any linear block or convolutional codes that use large nonbinary symbols. In addition, this paper combines the list decoding and the soft decision decoding of block codes together. Simulation results show that only soft decision provides significant benefit of the short list-of-2 for block decoding with list Viterbi algorithm (LVA). Hard decision provides almost no benefit with very short list. The (31, 26, 3) BCH code is the selected inner code since it is a well-known good code and the 26-bit outer symbol size is large enough for VSD.