Heuristic search based soft-input soft-output decoding of arithmetic codes

The paper described an optimal search based and a heuristic search based decoding algorithm for arithmetic codes and compared their performance and complexity with the traditional "hard" bit based AC decoder. To approach a different error resilient AC decoding, a heuristic search algorithms (HSAs) in artificial intelligence for finding the minimal-weight path through directed and nonnegatively-weighted graphs is utilized when the bitstream is transmitted over error prone channels. Simulation results showed that both algorithms easily outperformed traditional "hard" bits based arithmetic decoder, while the heuristic search based algorithm achieved a very good tradeoff between performance and complexity.