Bidirectional Viterbi decoding algorithm for OvTDM

Overlapped time domain multiplexing (OvTDM) is an innovative encoding scheme that can obtain high spectral efficiency. However, the intentional inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by OvTDM will make the decoding process more complex. The computational complexity of maximum likelihood sequence detection increases exponentially with the growth of spectral efficiency in OvTDM. As a consequence of high complexity, the decoding effort for a given spectral efficiency may occasionally exceed the physical limitations of the decoder, leading inevitably to buffer overflows and information erasures. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional Viterbi algorithm (BVA) based on the bidirectional sequence decoding for OvTDM. With the BVA, the decoding operation starts simultaneously from the both ends of the corresponding trellis and stops at the middle of trellis. The simulation results show that compared with Viterbi algorithm (VA), the decoding time of BVA can be reduced by about half. And the memory space of two decoders in BVA are about half of that in VA, which means that the BVA has lower memory requirements for decoder. And the decoding performance of BVA is almost the same as VA.