A Revisit to Ordered Statistics Decoding: Distance Distribution and Decoding Rules

This paper revisits the ordered statistics decoding (OSD). It provides a comprehensive analysis of the OSD algorithm by characterizing the statistical properties, evolution and the distribution of the Hamming distance and weighted Hamming distance from codeword estimates to the received sequence in the reprocessing stages of the OSD algorithm. We prove that the Hamming distance and weighted Hamming distance distributions can be characterized as mixture models capturing the decoding error probability and code weight enumerator. Simulation and numerical results show that our proposed statistical approaches can accurately describe the distance distributions. Based on these distributions and with the aim to reduce the decoding complexity, several techniques, including stopping rules and discarding rules, are proposed, and their decoding error performance and complexity are accordingly analyzed. Simulation results for decoding various eBCH codes demonstrate that the proposed techniques can significantly reduce the decoding complexity with a negligible loss in the decoding error performance.