Node Synchronization for the Viterbi Decoder
- 1 May 1984
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Communications
- Vol. 32 (5) , 524-531
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tcom.1984.1096098
Abstract
Motivated by the needs of NASA's Voyager 2 mission, in this paper we describe an algorithm which detects and corrects losses of node synchronization in convolutionally encoded data. This algorithm, which would be implemented as a hardware device external to a Viterbi decoder, makes statistical decisions about node synch based on the hard-quantized undecoded data stream. We will show that in a worst-case Voyager environment, our method will detect and correct a true loss of synch (thought to be a very rare event) within several hundred bits; many of the resulting outages will be corrected by the outer Reed-Solomon code. At the same time, the mean time between false alarms is on the order of several years, independent of the signal-to-noise ratio.Keywords
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