Low Complexity Viterbi Decoder for RSCC Concatenated Codes

Abstract One of the primary obstacles to achieving reliable communication transmission for aerospace applications is the power constraints. Therefore, it is appealing to use powerful channel coding techniques with small complexity of decoding. The robust forward error correction scheme using Reed-Solomon as outer code concatenated with convolutional as inner code is an appealing scheme whose apps are commonly used in wireless and space transmissions. In this work we aim to reduce the complexity of the convolutional code decoding process as the number of computations and memory need increases exponentially with the code’s constraint length. We use the Adaptive Viterbi Algorithm to bring Viterbi decoder with small complexity. The proposed work yields approximately the same error performance as the conventional concatenated Reed-Solomon convolutional, while requiring a substantially smaller average number of computations for the convolutional code decoding process.