Limited-trial chase-like algorithms achieving bounded-distance decoding

A soft-decision decoder for an error-correcting block code of Hamming distance d is said to achieve bounded-distance (BD) decoding if its error-correction radius is equal to that of a complete Euclidean distance decoder. The Chase decoding algorithms are reliability-based algorithms achieving BD decoding. The least complex version of the original Chase algorithms ("Chase-3") uses O(d) trials of a conventional binary decoder. In this correspondence, we propose classes of Chase-like BD decoding algorithms of lower complexity than the original Chase-3 algorithm. In particular, the least complex members of these classes require only O(d/sup 2/3/) trials.