Stage-hopping memory management technique for Viterbi decoders

Abstract

A new memory management technique for survivor paths in Viterbi decoder is proposed in this paper. It is based on a central concept that states reserved for merely certain stages will be enough to decode out the whole sequence. Thus, traceback could be complete faster since it could be realized block-by-block instead of stage-by-stage. Furthermore, the central concept leads to a new memory management method that records states only for those necessary stages. Thus, compared with other methods, the major drawbacks of TBM- decoding latency could be greatly reduced approaching the extent of REA and up to 45% of the memory size could be saved in hardware implementation by the newly proposed method entitled Stage-Hopping TBM (SH-TBM).