Probabilistic sufficient conditions on optimality for reliability based decoding of linear block codes

In this work, an efficient approach is introduced for reliability-based list decoding of a linear block code. This method terminates the decoding if a local optimal candidate satisfies a probabilistic sufficient condition. The average computation complexity is greatly reduced with this method. The false alarm probability associated with the use of the probabilistic sufficient condition is also derived. Simulation results confirm the analysis with no performance degradation and important computation savings on average for soft decision decoding of the (255,239) RS code (reduction by a factor between 2 and 20).