A New Treatment of Priority-First Search Maximum-Likelihood Soft-Decision Decoding of Linear Block Codes

In this correspondence we present a new method to convert the maximum-likelihood soft-decision decoding problem for linear block codes into a graph search problem where generalized Dijkstra’s algorithm can still be applied to the decoding procedure. The cost assigned to every branch in the graph is based on a generalization of Wagner rule which is an equivalent form of the maximum-likelihood decoding rule used in [1]. The new decoding algorithm uses the properties of error patterns to reduce the search space.