A reduced-power-consumption decoding strategy for personal communications mobiles

Families of TCM codes that offer improved time-diversity for fading channel applications have been proposed earlier, with codes having a larger number of states offering better performance, but at the cost of increased decoding effort. In this paper, a staged decoding procedure is outlined for decoding transmissions that are protected by a powerful code, resulting in reduced average power consumption in the hand-held mobile unit. Average power consumption is computed based on error event rate bounds for Viterbi decoding using a variable number of decoder states less than the number of coder states.