MIT 6.

02 DRAFT Lecture Notes

Fall 2010 (Last update: October 6, 2010)
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L ECTURE 9

Viterbi Decoding of Convolutional

Codes
This lecture describes an elegant and efficient method to decode convolutional codes. It
avoids the explicit enumeration of the 2N possible combinations of N -bit parity bit sequences. This method was invented by Andrew Viterbi (57, SM 57) and bears his name.

9.1

The Problem

At the receiver, we have a sequence of voltage samples corresponding to the parity bits
that the transmitter has sent. For simplicity, and without loss of generality, we will assume
1 sample per bit.
In the previous lecture, we assumed that these voltages have been digitized to form a received bit sequence. If we decode this received bit sequence, the decoding process is termed
hard decision decoding (aka hard decoding). If we decode the voltage samples directly
before digitizing them, we term the process soft decision decoding (aka soft decoding).
The Viterbi decoder can be used in either case. Intuitively, because hard decision decoding
makes an early decision regarding whether a bit is 0 or 1, it throws away information in the
digitizing process. It might make a wrong decision, especially for voltages near the threshold, introducing a greater number of bit errors in the received bit sequence. Although it
still produces the most likely transmitted sequence given the received sequence, by introducing additional errors in the early digitization, the overall reduction in the probability of
bit error will be smaller than with soft decision decoding. But it is conceptually a bit easier
to understand hard decoding, so we will start with that, before going on to soft decision
decoding.
As mentioned in the previous lecture, the trellis provides a good framework for understanding decoding. Suppose we have the entire trellis in front of us for a code, and
now receive a sequence of digitized bits (or voltage samples). If there are no errors (i.e.,
the noise is low), then there will be some path through the states of the trellis that would
exactly match up with the received sequence. That path (specifically, the concatenation of
the encoding of each state along the path) corresponds to the transmitted parity bits. From
1

LECTURE 9. VITERBI DECODING OF CONVOLUTIONAL CODES

Figure 9-1: The trellis is a convenient way of viewing the decoding task and understanding the time evolution of the state machine.

there, getting to the original message is easy because the top arc emanating from each node
in the trellis corresponds to a 0 bit and the bottom arrow corresponds to a 1 bit.
When there are errors, what can we do? As explained earlier, finding the most likely
transmitted message sequence is appealing because it minimizes the BER. If we can come
up with a way to capture the errors introduced by going from one state to the next, then
we can accumulate those errors along a path and come up with an estimate of the total
number of errors along the path. Then, the path with the smallest such accumulation of
errors is the path we want, and the transmitted message sequence can be easily determined
by the concatenation of states explained above.
To solve this problem, we need a way to capture any errors that occur in going through
the states of the trellis, and a way to navigate the trellis without actually materializing the
entire trellis (i.e., without enumerating all possible paths through it and then finding the
one with smallest accumulated error). The Viterbi decoder solves these problems. It is an
example of a more general approach to solving optimization problems, called dynamic programming. Later in the course, we will apply similar concepts in network routing protocols
to find good paths in multi-hop networks.

9.2

The Viterbi Decoder

The decoding algorithm uses two metrics: the branch metric (BM) and the path metric
(PM). The branch metric is a measure of the distance between what was transmitted and
what was received, and is defined for each arc in the trellis. In hard decision decoding,
where we are given a sequence of digitized parity bits, the branch metric is the Hamming
distance between the expected parity bits and the received ones. An example is shown in

SECTION 9.2. THE VITERBI DECODER

Figure 9-2: The branch metric for hard decision decoding. In this example, the receiver gets the parity bits
00.

Figure 9-2, where the received bits are 00. For each state transition, the number on the arc
shows the branch metric for that transition. Two of the branch metrics are 0, corresponding
to the only states and transitions where the corresponding Hamming distance is 0. The
other non-zero branch metrics correspond to cases when there are bit errors.
The path metric is a value associated with a state in the trellis (i.e., a value associated
with each node). For hard decision decoding, it corresponds to the Hamming distance
over the most likely path from the initial state to the current state in the trellis. By most
likely, we mean the path with smallest Hamming distance between the initial state and
the current state, measured over all possible paths between the two states. The path with
the smallest Hamming distance minimizes the total number of bit errors, and is most likely
when the BER is low.
The key insight in the Viterbi algorithm is that the receiver can compute the path metric
for a (state, time) pair incrementally using the path metrics of previously computed states
and the branch metrics.

9.2.1

Computing the Path Metric

Suppose the receiver has computed the path metric PM[s, i] for each state s (of which
there are 2k1 , where k is the constraint length) at time step i. The value of PM[s, i] is the
total number of bit errors detected when comparing the received parity bits to the most
likely transmitted message, considering all messages that could have been sent by the
transmitter until time step i (starting from state 00, which we will take by convention to
be the starting state always).
Among all the possible states at time step i, the most likely state is the one with the
smallest path metric. If there is more than one such state, they are all equally good possibilities.
Now, how do we determine the path metric at time step i + 1, PM[s, i + 1], for each
state s? To answer this question, first observe that if the transmitter is at state s at time
step i + 1, then it must have been in only one of two possible states at time step i. These
two predecessor states, labeled and , are always the same for a given state. In fact, they

LECTURE 9. VITERBI DECODING OF CONVOLUTIONAL CODES

depend only on the constraint length of the code and not on the parity functions. Figure 92 shows the predecessor states for each state (the other end of each arrow). For instance,
for state 00, = 00 and = 01; for state 01, = 10 and = 11.
Any message sequence that leaves the transmitter in state s at time i + 1 must have left
the transmitter in state or state at time i. For example, in Figure 9-2, to arrive in state
01 at time i + 1, one of the following two properties must hold:
1. The transmitter was in state 10 at time i and the ith message bit was a 0. If that is
the case, then the transmitter sent 11 as the parity bits and there were two bit errors,
because we received the bits 00. Then, the path metric of the new state, PM[01, i + 1]
is equal to PM[10, i] + 2, because the new state is 01 and the corresponding path
metric is larger by 2 because there are 2 errors.
2. The other (mutually exclusive) possibility is that the transmitter was in state 11 at
time i and the ith message bit was a 0. If that is the case, then the transmitter sent 01
as the parity bits and tere was one bit error, because we received 00. The path metric
of the new state, PM[01, i + 1] is equal to PM[11, i] + 1.
Formalizing the above intuition, we can easily see that
PM[s, i + 1] = min(PM[, i] + BM[ s], PM[, i] + BM[ s]),

(9.1)

where and are the two predecessor states.

In the decoding algorithm, it is important to remember which arc corresponded to the
minimum, because we need to traverse this path from the final state to the initial one
keeping track of the arcs we used, and then finally reverse the order of the bits to produce
the most likely message.

9.2.2

Finding the Most Likely Path

We can now describe how the decoder finds the most likely path. Initially, state 00 has a
cost of 0 and the other 2k1 1 states have a cost of .
The main loop of the algorithm consists of two main steps: calculating the branch metric
for the next set of parity bits, and computing the path metric for the next column. The path
metric computation may be thought of as an add-compare-select procedure:
1. Add the branch metric to the path metric for the old state.
2. Compare the sums for paths arriving at the new state (there are only two such paths
to compare at each new state because there are only two incoming arcs from the
previous column).
3. Select the path with the smallest value, breaking ties arbitrarily. This path corresponds to the one with fewest errors.
Figure 9-3 shows the algorithm in action from one time step to the next. This example
shows a received bit sequence of 11 10 11 00 01 10 and how the receiver processes it. The
fourth picture from the top shows all four states with the same path metric. At this stage,
any of these four states and the paths leading up to them are most likely transmitted bit
sequences (they all have a Hamming distance of 2). The bottom-most picture shows the
same situation with only the survivor paths shown. A survivor path is one that has a chance
of being the most likely path; there are many other paths that can be pruned away because
there is no way in which they can be most likely. The reason why the Viterbi decoder is

SECTION 9.3. SOFT DECISION DECODING

practical is that the number of survivor paths is much, much smaller than the total number
of paths in the trellis.
Another important point about the Viterbi decoder is that future knowledge will help it
break any ties, and in fact may even cause paths that were considered most likely at a
certain time step to change. Figure 9-4 continues the example in Figure 9-3, proceeding until all the received parity bits are decoded to produce the most likely transmitted message,
which has two bit errors.

9.3

Soft Decision Decoding

Hard decision decoding digitizes the received voltage signals by comparing it to a threshold, before passing it to the decoder. As a result, we lose information: if the voltage was
0.500001, the confidence in the digitization is surely much lower than if the voltage was
0.999999. Both are treated as 1, and the decoder now treats them the same way, even
though it is overwhelmingly more likely that 0.999999 is a 1 compared to the other value.
Soft decision decoding (also sometimes known as soft input Viterbi decoding) builds
on this observation. It does not digitize the incoming samples prior to decoding. Rather, it uses
a continuous function of the analog sample as the input to the decoder. For example, if the
expected parity bit is 0 and the received voltage is 0.3 V, we might use 0.3 (or 0.32 , or some
such function) as the value of the bit instead of digitizing it.
For technical reasons that will become apparent later, an attractive soft decision metric
is the square of the difference between the received voltage and the expected one. If the
convolutional code produces p parity bits, and the p corresponding analog samples are
v = v1 , v2 , . . . , vp , one can construct a soft decision branch metric as follows
BMsoft [u, v] =

i=1

(ui vi )2 ,

(9.2)

where u = u1 , u2 , . . . , up are the expected p parity bits (each a 0 or 1). Figure 9-5 shows the
soft decision branch metric for p = 2 when u is 00.
With soft decision decoding, the decoding algorithm is identical to the one previously
described for hard decision decoding, except that the branch metric is no longer an integer
Hamming distance but a positive real number (if the voltages are all between 0 and 1, then
the branch metric is between 0 and 1 as well).
It turns out that this soft decision metric is closely related to the probability of the decoding
being correct when the channel experiences additive Gaussian noise. First, lets look at the
simple case of 1 parity bit (the more general case is a straightforward extension). Suppose
the receiver gets the ith parity bit as vi volts. (In hard decision decoding, it would decode
as 0 or 1 depending on whether vi was smaller or larger than 0.5.) What is the probability
that vi would have been received given that bit ui (either 0 or 1) was sent? With zero-mean
additive Gaussian noise, the PDF of this event is given by
2

edi /2
f (vi |ui ) =
,
2 2
where di = vi2 if ui = 0 and di = (vi 1)2 if ui = 1.

(9.3)

LECTURE 9. VITERBI DECODING OF CONVOLUTIONAL CODES

The log likelihood of this PDF is proportional to d2i . Moreover, along a path, the PDF
of the sequence V = v1 , v2 , . . . , vp being received given that a code word U = ui , u2 , . . . , up
was sent, is given by the product of a number of terms each resembling Eq. (9.3). The
logarithm of this PDF for the path is equal to the sum of the individual log likelihoods,

and is proportional to i d2i . But thats precisely the negative of the branch metric we
defined in Eq. (9.2), which the Viterbi decoder minimizes along the different possible
paths! Minimizing this path metric is identical to maximizing the log likelihood along
the different paths, implying that the soft decision decoder produces the most likely path
that is consistent with the received voltage sequence.
This direct relationship with the logarithm of the probability is the reason why we chose
the sum of squares as the branch metric in Eq. (9.2). A different noise distribution (other
than Gaussian) may entail a different soft decoding branch metric to obtain an analogous
connection to the PDF of a correct decoding.

9.4

Performance Issues

There are three important performance metrics for convolutional coding and decoding:
1. How much state and space does the encoder need?
2. How much time does the decoder take?
3. What is the reduction in the bit error rate, and how does that compare with other
codes?
The first question is the easiest: the amount of space is linear in K, the constraint length,
and the encoder is much easier to implement than the Viterbi decoder. The decoding time
depends mainly on K; as described, we need to process O(2K ) transitions each bit time, so
the time complexity is exponential in K. Moreover, as described, we can decode the first
bits of the message only at the very end. A little thought will show that although a little future knowledge is useful, it is unlikely that what happens at bit time 1000 will change our
decoding decision for bit 1, if the constraint length is, say, 6. In fact, in practice the decoder
starts to decode bits once it has reached a time step that is a small multiple of the constraint
length; experimental data suggests that 5 K message bit times (or thereabouts) is a reasonable decoding window, regardless of how long the parity bit stream corresponding to
the message it.
The reduction in error probability and comparisons with other codes is a more involved
and detailed issue. The answer depends on the constraint length (generally speaking,
larger K has better error correction), the number of generators (larger this number, the
lower the rate, and the better the error correction), and the amount of noise. A related
question is how much better soft decision decoding is compared to hard decision decoding.
Figure 9-6 shows some representative performance results for a set of codes all of the
same code rate (1/2).1 The top-most curve shows the uncoded probability of bit error. The
x axis plots the amount of noise on the channel (lower noise is toward the right; the axis
plots the signal to noise ratio on a log scale. The units of the x axis is decibels, or dB;
1

You will produce similar pictures in one of your lab tasks using your implementations of the Viterbi and
rectangular parity code decoders.

SECTION 9.5. SUMMARY

it is defined as 10 log10 Eb /N0 , where E b is the signal strength (0.52 = 0.25 in our case
because the difference between a voltage sent and the threshold voltage is 0.5 V) and N0 is
the noise, which for technical reasons is defined as 2 2 ( is the Gaussian noise variance
the factor of 2 is the technical definition).
The important point is that the x axis is proportional to the logarithm of 1/(noise variance).
The y axis shows the probability of a decoding error on a log scale.
Some observations:
1. The probability of error is roughly the same for the rectangular parity code and hard
decision decoding with K = 3. The reason is that both schemes essentially produce
parity bits that are built from similar amounts of history. In the rectangular parity
case, the row parity bit comes from two successive message bits, while the column
parity comes from two message bits with one skipped in between. But we also send
the message bits, so were mimicking a similar constraint length (amount of memory)
to the K = 3 convolutional code.
2. The probability of error for a given amount of noise is noticeably lower for K = 4
compared to K = 3.
3. The probability of error for a given amount of noise is dramatically lower with soft
decision decoding than hard decision decoding. In fact, K = 3 and soft decoding
beats K = 4 and hard decoding in these graphs. For a given error probability (and
signal), the degree of noise that can be tolerated with soft decoding is much higher
(about 2.53 decibels).

9.5

Summary

From its relatively modest, though hugely impactful, beginnings as a method to decode
convolutional codes, Viterbi decoding has become one of the most widely used algorithms
in a wide range of fields and engineering systems. Modern disk drives with PRML
technology to speed-up accesses, speech recognition systems, natural language systems,
and a variety of communication networks use this scheme or its variants.
In fact, a more modern view of the soft decision decoding technique described in this
lecture is to think of the procedure as finding the most likely set of traversed states in
a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Some underlying phenomenon is modeled as a Markov
state machine with probabilistic transitions between its states; we see noisy observations
from each state, and would like to piece together the observations to determine the most
likely sequence of states traversed. It turns out that the Viterbi decoder is an excellent
starting point to solve this class of problems (and sometimes the complete solution).
On the other hand, despite its undeniable success, Viterbi decoding isnt the only way
to decode convolutional codes. For one thing, its computational complexity is exponential
in the constraint length, k, because it does require each of these states to be enumerated.
When k is large, one may use other decoding methods such as BCJR or Fanos sequential
decoding scheme, for instance.
Convolutional codes themselves are very popular over both wired and wireless links.
They are sometimes used as the inner code with an outer block error correcting code,
but they may also be used with just an outer error detection code.

LECTURE 9. VITERBI DECODING OF CONVOLUTIONAL CODES

We are now at the end of the four lectures on error detection and error correcting codes
to design point-to-point links over a communication channel. The techniques for error detection and correction constitute a key component of the physical layer of a communication
network. In the next few lectures, we will move from the issues of a point-to-point link to
sharing a common channel amongst multiple nodes that wish to communicate. Our solution to this problem involves approaches that affect two layers of the network: the physical
layer and the so-called link layer (we will study a class of protocols called media access
protocols that form part of the link layer. We will develop these ideas and then get back
to the different layers of the network in a few lectures.

SECTION 9.5. SUMMARY

Figure 9-3: The Viterbi decoder in action. This picture shows 4 time steps. The bottom-most picture is the
same as the one just before it, but with only the survivor paths shown.

10

LECTURE 9. VITERBI DECODING OF CONVOLUTIONAL CODES

Figure 9-4: The Viterbi decoder in action (continued from Figure 9-3. The decoded message is shown. To
produce this message, start from the final state with smallest path metric and work backwards, and then
reverse the bits. At each state during the forward pass, it is important to remeber the arc that got us to this
state, so that the backward pass can be done properly.

11

SECTION 9.5. SUMMARY

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Figure 9-5: Branch metric for soft decision decoding.

Figure 9-6: Error correcting performance results for different rate-1/2 codes.