Lazy Decoding for Block Fading Channels

This paper deals with decoding latency and power consumption reduction techniques, with a special focus on packet transmission over non-ergodic block fading channels. Based on information theory, we propose a decoder activation criterion that forecasts unsuccessful decoding attempts before activating the decoding process. This solution permits to avoid useless decoder activations and consequent inefficient decoder computations. Simulation results show that our proposal permits to substantially reduce the average packet decoding cost without degrading performance.