Fast Blind Recognition of Channel Codes

We present a fast algorithm that, for a given input sequence and a linear channel code, computes the syndrome posterior probability (SPP) of the code, i.e., the probability that all parity check relations of the code are satisfied. According to this algorithm, the SPP can be computed blindly, i.e., given the soft information on a received sequence we can compute the SPP for the code without first decoding the bits. We show that the proposed scheme is efficient by investigating its computational complexity. We then consider two scenarios where our proposed SPP algorithm can be used. The first scenario is when we are interested in finding out whether a certain code was used to encode a data stream. We formulate a statistical hypothesis test and we investigate its performance. We also compare the performance of our scheme with that of an existing scheme. The second scenario deals with how we can use the algorithm for reducing the computational complexity of a blind decoding process. We propose a heuristic sequential statistical hypotheses test to use the fact that in real applications, the data arrives sequentially, and we investigate its performance using system simulations.