ON SEQUENTIAL DECODING FOR THE GILBERT CHANNEL.

Summary form only given. It is well known that the computational performance of sequential decoding deteriorates drastically when channel errors occur in clusters. A feasible modification of sequential decoding which uses a burst-tracking method for better performance has been previously suggested, considering at each step that the channel is memoryless but has varying probability of error. The authors present a different way of using sequential decoding to utilize the memory of a Gilbert channel, using a Fano-like metric matched to the channel. Each frame is divided into blocks. The blocks are transmitted after interleaving. The received sequence is deinterleaved in the obvious way. Flags will be used to denote that it is in the bad state. A Fano-like metric m is calculated for each received symbol. With short interleaving the new algorithm seems to be slightly better.