Near maximum likelihood soft-decision decoding of a particular class of rate-1/2 systematic linear block codes

Presented is a soft-decision decoding algorithm for a particular class of rate-1/2 systematic linear block codes. The proposed algorithm performs successive re-encoding of both the data and parity bits, to produce a list of codewords among which the most likely candidate is chosen. Simulation results show that close to optimal performance can be obtained at reasonable complexity. They validate the potential of the proposed algorithm as a practical approach for soft-decision decoding.