Evaluating the Exact Performance of the Viterbi Algorithm

A Hidden Markov Modeling technique is used to evaluate the exact performance of the Viterbi algorithm for estimating states of a finite state system. This technique is applied to exact calculation of the bit error probability of the Viterbi decoder of a convolutional code in channels with independent errors and in channels with memory. The results are compared with the widely used upper bounds. The accuracy of the proposed methods is verified via computer simulation.