Soft Decision Decoding of Block Codes

Abstract

Using a general decoding technique of Solomon we evaluate the performance of certain block codes on a gaussian channel. Quadratic residue codes of lengths 48 and 80 as well as BCH codes of length 128 and rates 1/2 and 1/3 are considered. All four of these codes perform quite favorably with respect to the constraint-length 7 rate 1/2 convolutional code presently used on NASA's Mariner-class spacecraft.