Wavefront decoding of trellis codes

A novel reduced-complexity trellis decoding algorithm is described. The new algorithm, called wavefront decoding (WD), avoids the throughput bottleneck caused by metric and state-information feedback, which characterizes previously known breadth-first decoding algorithms. The error performance of WD for trellis-coded 8PSK on AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels is investigated by simulation. The results indicate that for a given number of survivor paths, the performance of WD is comparable, although necessarily inferior, to that of the M-algorithm, However, in contrast to the M-algorithm, WD exhibits a high degree of temporal parallelism, rendering it suitable for high speed applications