A robust Viterbi decoder and its application to terrestrial HDTV broadcasting

The conventional Viterbi (1967) decoder employing the Euclidean distance has been widely used and considered as the optimum one in the sense of maximum likelihood sequence decoding under the hypothesis of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). However, what will happen if the noise distributions of actual channels deviate from the assumed AWGN? A robust Viterbi decoder utilizing absolute distance is carefully examined. Analytical and numerical results show that this Viterbi decoder is more advantageous than the conventional Viterbi decoder for actual channels with various kinds of interference, particularly in the presence of impulsive noise. Finally the robust Viterbi decoder is applied to TCM-8VSB terrestrial HDTV broadcasting, achieving 0.5-1.0 dB SNR gains over the conventional Viterbi decoder on contaminated AWGN channels.