Bidirectional decoding of convolutional codes for indoor cellular radio

Bidirectional suboptimal breadth-first decoding of convolutional codes is an attractive technique for slowly varying and quasi-static fading channels as it restricts the extent of decoding errors due to correct path loss to very heavy noise or interference regions. This paper compares the performance of such a decoding scheme to the Viterbi algorithm over wideband TDMA indoor radio links where equalization and space diversity are also used to combat dispersive fading and cochannel interference. On the basis of equal computational complexity and equal decoding delay, suboptimal, breadth-first, bidirectional decoding of a long constraint length convolutional code is shown to be superior to Viterbi decoding of a shorter constraint length code. Furthermore, this advantage increases as the outage criterion (in terms of bit error rate) becomes more stringent which makes bidirectional decoding particularly attractive for data applications and makes channel coding a more attractive alternative to increasing the space diversity order at the receiver