A new blind rate decision algorithm

In variable rate communication systems where the information of the data rate is not given to the receiver, estimating the data rate in the receiver is a very important factor in terms of determining the receiver performance. So far many algorithms estimating the received data rate have been proposed. The most popular one is the post-rate decision method using the Viterbi decoder. It causes the large power consumption due to high complexity, and requires much processing time. A new pre-rate decision method using a pre-decoder is proposed, which has a relatively simple structure in comparison with the Viterbi decoder. Compared with other existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm reduces the power consumption and increases the processing speed in the systems.