In recent years, there has been a great demand for efficient and reliable digital data transmission and storage systems. This demand has been accelerated by the emergence of large-scale, high-speed data networks and global satellite telephony for exchange, processing, and storage of digital information in military, governmental, and private spheres. A merging of telecommunications and computer technology is required in the design of these systems. A major concern of the designer is the control of transmission and storage errors so that reliable reproduction of data can be obtained. This research proposal addresses some efficient means to achieve reliable data transmission and storage. Error control coding is the most powerful technique for achieving reliable data transmission and has become an integral part in almost every data communication system design. Today very sophistical error control coding schemes are being used in a broad range of data communication systems to achieve reliable data transmission. This project is set up to investigate an important aspect of error control coding, soft-decision decoding of codes. The objective is to devise efficient soft-decision decoding algorithms for codes to attain either optimal or suboptimal error performance with reduced decoding complexity and delay. Algorithms to be investigated include: (1) MAP algorithms; (2) MLD and suboptimum decoding algorithms; (3) trellis-based decoding algorithms; and (4) turbo decoding of Reed-Solomon codes through binary decomposition. Important features in these decoding algorithms are: bi-directional and parallel processing, code decomposition and multistage decoding.
