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 here employ a soft decoding algorithm for CC decoding, and introduce several schemes to identify error patterns using the posterior information from the CC soft decoding module. The resultant iterative decoding-detecting (IDD) algorithm improves error performance by iteratively updating the extrinsic information based on the CRC parity check matrix. Assuming errors only happen in unreliable bits characterized by small absolute values of the log-likelihood ratio (LLR), we also develop a partial IDD (P-IDD) alternative which exhibits comparable performance to IDD by updating only a subset of unreliable bits. 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 noniterative, 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 both IDD and IVA are better tailored for single parity check (PC) codes than for CRC codes. SDSD outperforms both IDD 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.