Performance of the Bounded Distance Decoder on the AWGN Channel

In contrast to a maximum-likelihood decoder, it is often desirable to use an incomplete decoder that can detect its decoding errors with high probability. One common choice is the bounded distance decoder. Bounds are derived for the total word error rate, Pw, and the undetected error rate, Pu. Excellent agreement is found with simulation results for a small code, and the bounds are shown to be tractable for a larger code.