Improved analysis of list decoding and its application to convolutional codes

In this paper, the concepts of effective weight enumerating function and generalized pairwise error event are introduced to predict the performance of linear block codes with list decoding. For the first time, a method to evaluate the actual effective codeword weights for a given code, rather than a lower bound on effective codeword weights, is proposed. Based on these actual effective codeword weights, the performance of a given code with list decoding can be predicted more accurately. We propose an analytical method to evaluate the performance of a given code with list decoding and consider terminated convolutional codes to show the validity of the analysis.