We introduce a novel soft-decision decoding algorithm for binary block codes named ordered reliability direct error pattern testing (ORDEPT). The proposed technique tests a list of partial error patterns (PEP)s that are arranged according to their logistic weight and completed on-the-fly based on the instantaneous received sequence and the code’s parity-check matrix. Our results, obtained for a variety of popular short high-rate codes, demonstrate that ORDEPT outperforms state-of-the-art decoding algorithms such as ordered reliability bits guessing random additive noise decoding (ORBGRAND) in terms of decoding complexity, and is hardware-favorable in terms of latency and energy consumption. The improvements carry on to the iterative decoding of product codes and convolutional product-like codes, where ORDEPT demonstrates the ability to efficiently find multiple candidate codewords and outperform state-of-the art competitors.

In this work we introduce a novel soft-decision decoding algorithm for high-rate short error-correction codes. Our results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves over the state-of-the-art algorithms, including recently proposed Ordered Reliability Bits Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (ORBGRAND), in terms of latency and decoding complexity. Specifically, we demonstrate that the ability of the proposed algorithm to find multiple candidate codewords with a reduced number of low-complexity queries makes it an efficient component decoder for iterative decoding of product-like codes.