Improved Decoding of Linear Block Codes by Concatenated Decoders

The use of decoding algorithms allows us to retrieve information after transmitting it over a noisy communication channel. Soft decision decoding is powerful in concatenation schemes that use two or more levels of decoding. In our case, we make a concatenation between the Hartmann & Rudolph (HR) algorithm as symbol-by-symbol decoder and the chase-2 algorithm that is word-to-word decoding algorithm. In this paper, we propose to combine two decoding algorithms for constructing a new one with more efficiency and less complexity. This work consists firstly to use the HR with a reduced number of codewords of the dual code then the Chase-2 algorithm which exploits the output of PHR. The simulations results and the comparisons made show that the proposed decoding scheme guarantees very good performance with reduced temporal complexity.