On the performance of sequential and Viterbi decoders for high-rate punctured convolutional codes

This paper presents new computationally efficient and accurate techniques for estimating the performance of specific high-rate punctured convolutional codes and uses these techniques to evaluate the performance of sequential and Viterbi decoders for the best known codes. In particular, it demonstrates that the disparity between sequential and Viterbi decoding increases dramatically for long memory codes with high rates and for such codes, the union bound cannot be used as a criterion for selecting good codes for sequential decoders. In contrast, it shows that the proposed methods can be used as efficient tools for performance evaluation and/or identification of good high-rate punctured convolutional codes for use with sequential decoders.