On the weight distribution of terminated convolutional codes

  • Authors:

  • M. P.C. Fossorier;Shu Lin;D. J. Costello, Jr.

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Electr. Eng., Hawaii Univ., Honolulu, HI;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 754.84

Visualization

Abstract

In this correspondence, the low-weight terms of the weight distribution of the block code obtained by terminating a convolutional code after x information blocks are expressed as a function of x. It is shown that this function is linear in x for codes with noncatastrophic encoders, but quadratic in x for codes with catastrophic encoders. These results are useful to explain the poor performance of convolutional codes with a catastrophic encoder at low-to-medium signal-to-noise ratios