Soft-decision priority-first decoding algorithms for variable-length error-correcting codes

Joint source-channel decoding has recently received extensive attention due to the rise in the applications of multimedia wireless communication. Based on a code trellis rather than on a code tree, this work presents a maximum a posteriori (MAP) soft-decision priority-first decoding algorithm and its approximations for variable-length error-correcting codes. Simulation results indicate that for the code with average codeword length 6.269 bits and free distance 3, under moderate signal-to-noise ratio, one of the proposed algorithms almost reaches the lowest decoding complexity, and has nearly the same performance on symbol error probability as the MAP decoding.