Impact of code rate on the performance of Viterbi decoder in AWGN channel

The most of the modern hand held communicating devices rely on forward error correction techniques for their proper functioning. Convolutional coding and Viterbi decoding is one of the forward error correction technique used in most of the communication applications. This paper investigates the impact of code rates on the performance of hard decision Viterbi decoder. In this paper different rates such as 1/2, 2/3 and 3/5 have been simulated using different constraint lengths from 5 to 10 as well as different generator polynomials. All the simulations are conducted in MATLAB over AWGN channel. The paper also investigates the impact of trace back length on the performance of Viterbi decoder. The decoding time for different constraint lengths have also been observed.