A Tightened Upper Bound on the Error Probability of Binary Convolutional Codes with Viterbi Decoding

Tighter upper bounds on the error event and the bit error probabilities, respectively, for maximum-likelihood decoding of binary convolutional codes on the binary symmetric channel are derived from upper bounds previously published by Viterbi [1]. The measured bit error rate
P_b
for a constraint length 3 decoder has been plotted versus the channel transition probability
p
and shows close agreement with the improved bound on the bit error probability.