CRC-Assisted Error Correction in a Convolutionally Coded System

In communication systems employing a serially concatenated cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code along with a convolutional code (CC), erroneous packets after CC decoding are usually discarded. The list Viterbi algorithm (LVA) and the iterative Viterbi algorithm (IVA) are two existing approaches capable of recovering erroneously decoded packets. We first propose an iterative log-MAP (ILM) algorithm improves error performance by iteratively updating the extrinsic information based on the CRC parity check matrix. We further derive a soft-decision syndrome decoding (SDSD) algorithm, which identifies error patterns from a set of binary linear equations derived from CRC syndrome equations. Being non-iterative, SDSD is able to estimate error patterns directly from the decoder output. The packet error rate (PER) performance of SDSD is analyzed following the union bound approach on pairwise errors. Simulations indicate that SDSD outperforms both ILM and LVA with weak CC and strong CRC. Applicable to AWGN and flat fading channels, our algorithms can also be extended to turbo coded systems.