Extended Hamming and BCH soft decision decoders for mobile data applications

A methodology is presented for the design and development of efficient trellis-based soft decision decoders for extended Hamming and BCH codes. A new metric for noncoherent discriminator detection is proposed that substantially improves the performance of trellis-based decoders over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Minimal edge trellises are then presented for the class of extended Hamming codes and the (32, 21) extended BCH code. The latter is in extensive use in narrow-band wireless data systems. An automatic request (ARQ) protocol is described that allows the soft decision decoders to outperform their hard decision counterparts in both reliability and throughput.