An Expurgation Upper Bound on the Probability of Correct Path Loss for List Decoding of Time-invariant Convolutional Codes

Abstract- In this paper list decoding of convolutional codes is considered. List decoding is a very powerful, low com-plexity, non-backtracking decoding method that does not fully exploit the error cor-recting capability of the code. A correct path loss is a serious kind of error event that is typical for list decoding. An expur-gated upper bound on the probability of correct path loss is derived for the ensem-bles of systematic and nonsystematic time-varying convolutional codes. In Viterbi decoding we first choose a suitable code and then design the decoder in order to “squeez