Genetic Algorithms for Soft-Decision Decoding of Linear Block Codes

Soft-decision decoding is an NP-hard problem of great interest to developers of communication systems. We show that this problem is equivalent to the problem of optimizing Walsh polynomials. We present genetic algorithms for soft-decision decoding of binary linear block codes and compare the performance with various other decoding algorithms including the currently developed A* algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithms achieve bit-error-probabilities as low as 0:00183 for a 104; 52] code with a low signal-to-noise ratio of 2:5 dB, exploring only 22; 400 codewords, whereas the search space contains 4:5 10 15 codewords. We deene a new crossover operator that exploits domain-speciic information and compare it with uniform and two point crossover.