Hard and Soft Decision Decoding Using Viterbi Algorithm

Any information that has to be transmitted undergoes a number of processes including the noise channels before it is extracted by the receiver. This brings in the need for reliable reception of information with minimum error rate. The main aim of this paper is to shed light on Viterbi algorithm as an error detection and correction method used to maintain the reliability of the system. This paper focuses on Viterbi Decoder, an efficient Hard/Soft algorithm devised to estimate the most likely path for convolutionally encoded data with implementation details on Hard and Soft decision techniques through various communication channels.