Soft-decision decoding by a compact genetic algorithm using higher selection pressure

Selection pressure controls the selection of individuals from one population to the next. It gives individuals of higher quality, higher probability of being used to create the next generation, and so for the algorithm to focus on promising regions in the search space. This paper introduces higher selection pressure to soft-decision decoding based on compact Genetic Algorithms(cGAD), and shows the effectiveness of tournament selection in the performances of the decoder. The effect of tournament size is also studied, and the new decoder based on higher selection pressure outperforms Chase-2 algorithm.