ISlT 1997, Ulm, Germany, June 29 - July 4
The Complexity of Hard-Decision Decoding of Linear Codes
A. Barg*l E. Kroukt
‘Bell Laboratories 2C-375 SSt. Petersburg State Academy
700 Mountain avenue of Aerospace Instrumentation
Murray Hill, N J 07974 Bol’shaja Morskaja 61
USA 190000 St. Petersburg, Russia
Abstract - We study a general method of mini-
mum distance decoding of linear codes that instead
of decoding the original code recovers the transmit-
ted codeword by a number of decodings of shortened
codes. We present an implementation of this method
whose complexity for long linear codes has the small-
est known value for any code rate R, 0 < R < 1.
Minimum distance decoding is the most powerful decod-
ing method from the point of view of transmission reliability.
Its applicability is hindered by high implementation complex-
ity. Even in the hard-decision setting all known algorithms
have complexity that grows exponentially with the length of
the code. Implementations of this decoding include brute-
force methods such as successive inspection of all codewords,
building up and storing the syndrome table (or the syndrome
trellis). We study the worst-case complexity of decoding al-
gorithms which is measured either as the number of computer
operations (time complexity) or the size of memory used for
the decoding (space complexity). Thus, for an [n, k, d] code
the decoding complexity does not exceed O(n(min(qk,q ” - k ) ) .
The most efficient implementation of minimum distance de-
coding suggests to successively encode groups of k coordinates
in the received vector y that correspond to information sets of
the code and choose the codeword c closest to y. General al-
gorithms that have the smallest known asymptotic complexity
[5], [2], [4] are all based on this idea.
After briefly commenting on these methods we discuss a
new approach. The idea is to perform a number of decodings
of supercodes of the original code C, i.e., linear codes C’ with
C c C’. Decoding a supercode amounts to restricting one-
self to a subset of parity checks of C, i.e., building a list of
candidates based on a part of the received syndrome. This
idea proves efficient for short codes allowing us to construct
reduced syndrome tables. We work out an example for the
[48,24] code. Decoding up to 5 errors requires the memory of
about 8K and about 3000 computer operations.
Asymptotic results of our work are established for almost
a l l linear codes except for a fraction of codes that decays expo-
nentially as the code length n grows. Let C be an [n, k ] linear
code and suppose k f n + R as n + 00. Let H be the parity-
check matrix of C. We restrict ourselves to correcting all coset
leaders of weight up to nGo(R), where &(R) = H Y 1 ( l - R).
By [l], this is sufficient for the maximum likelihood decoding
for almost all long codes.
Each iteration of our algorithm consists of the follow-
ing steps. First, we choose a random partition of the set
{ 1 , 2 , . . .,n} into subsets of size x , k - 2, and n - k. Then
the last subset is partitioned into s = [(n - k ) / y l segments of
‘Research done while at Dept.of Mathematics and Computer
Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The
Netherlands.
01997 I E EE
0-7803-3956-8/97/$10.00 331
H. C. A. vanTilborgt
tDept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
Eindhoven University of Technology
5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
length y. For every placement of the y-segment, we isolate a
+
linear code C(xly) of length x y with y parity checks, whose
panty-check matrix is formed by the corresponding rows and
columns of H. This code is decoded using the decoding algo-
rithm of [3]. This decoding supplies us with a list of candi-
dates for the message set of C. The final list of candidates for
a chosen partition is formed from those message vectors that
appear as decoding results of C(z(y) for at least two different
placements of the y-segment.
Let €(a,R) = (1 - R)[1- H2(=)]. The asymptotic com-
plexity of the algorithm is determined by the following theo-
rem.
Theorem 1 For almost all linear codes, the decoding algo-
rithm studied here performs maximum likelihood decoding. Its
sequential implementation has complezity qnr(R)(lto(l)). For
q = 2 the function y(R) has the form
0
The function yq(R) is also immediate but requires a few more
lines. Computations show that this function improves the best
known result [4] by a small but finite value for any q 2 2 and
all code rates R E ( 0 , l ) .
REFERENCES
[ l j V.M. Blinovskii, “Lower asymptotic bound on the number of
linear code words in a sphere of given radius in Fg,” Problems
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(English translation).
[2] J. T. Coffey and R. M. F. Goodman, “The complexity of infor-
mation set decoding,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, IT-35 (5)
(1990), 1031-1037.
[3] I. Dumer, “TWO decoding algorithms for linear codes,” Problems
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[4] -, “On minimum distance decoding of linear codes,”
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MOSCOW(1991), pp. 50-52.
[5] E.A. Krouk, “Decoding complexity bound for linear block
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