Box and match soft decision decoding of linear block codes with iterative information set reduction

The order statistic decoding (OSD) algorithm is a probabilistic list decoding algorithm which allows to achieve practically optimum soft decision decoding of binary linear block codes of length up to 128. Recently, matching techniques were applied to the OSD algorithm to reduce both the worst case and average complexities of decoding at the expense of memory. The corresponding box-and-match algorithm (BMA) allows to achieve near optimum decoding of codes of length up to 192. In this work, we investigate the application of iterative information set reduction to the BMA, which provides further refinements in the trade-offs between error performance and decoding complexity.