Error Exponents for Recursive Decoding of Reed–Muller Codes on a Binary-Symmetric Channel

Error exponents are studied for recursive decoding of Reed-Muller (RM) codes and their subcodes used on a binary-symmetric channel. The decoding process is first decomposed into similar steps, with one new information bit derived in each step. Multiple recursive additions and multiplications of the randomly corrupted channel outputs plusmn1 are performed using a specific order of these two operations in each step. Recalculated random outputs are compared in terms of their exponential moments. As a result, tight analytical bounds are obtained for decoding error probability of the two recursive algorithms considered in the paper. For both algorithms, the derived error exponents almost coincide with simulation results. Comparison of these bounds with similar bounds for bounded distance decoding and majority decoding shows that recursive decoding can reduce the output error probability of the latter two algorithms by five or more orders of magnitude even on the short block length of 256. It is also proven that the error probability of recursive decoding can be exponentially reduced by eliminating one or a few information bits from the original RM code