Performance of Soft Viterbi Decoder enhanced with Non-Transmittable Codewords for storage media

Abstract: The introduction of Non-Transmittable Codewords (NTCs) into Viterbi

Algorithm Decoder has emerged as one of the best ways of improving performance

of the Viterbi Algorithm Decoder. However, the performance has been tested only in

hard decision Viterbi Decoder in telecommunication systems, but not in soft decision

Viterbi Decoder and storage media. Most storage media use Reed Solomon (RS)

Algorithm Decoder. Yet, the field experience still shows failure of the algorithm in

correcting burst errors in reading data from the storage media; leading into data

loss. This paper introduces the Soft Viterbi Algorithm Decoding enhanced with Non-

Transmittable Codewords for storage media. Matlab software was used to simulate

the algorithm and the performance was measured by comparing residual errors in

a data length of one million bits. Additive White Gaussian Noise model was applied

to distort the stored data. The performance comparison was made against the Reed

Solomon code, Normal Soft Viterbi and Hard decision Viterbi enhanced with NTCs.

The results showed that the Soft Viterbi Algorithm enhanced with NTCs performed

remarkably better by 88.98% against RS, 84.31% against Normal Soft Viterbi and

67.26% against Hard Viterbi enhanced with NTCs.